Pablo Larrain’s Spencer, featuring Kristen Stewart as a tormented Princess of Wales on a Christmas holiday with the Royal Family at Sandringham House, is primarily of interest for the star’s transfixing performance as the put-upon noble who would rather be anywhere else than under sovereign…
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As an excavation of a place, time and a personal history, Roy’s World: Barry Gifford’s Chicago deconstructs Chicago poet and novelist Barry Gifford in an original movie portrait of the artist as a young man, told in a variety of forms, against a backdrop…
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As Roger Ebert frequently asserted, the first and most important question to ask of a film is what its makers intended, and the second is how well they executed upon said intentions. This, of course, does not allow for questioning whether what was intended/executed…
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No Time to Die is a smashing piece of entertainment, a movie so much fun to watch—extravagant in the usual James Bond ways that provide immeasurable movie comfort—and such a generous swan song for star Daniel Craig that you’d have to be a bitterly…
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In the opening scene of The Eyes of Tammy Faye, an unrecognizable Jessica Chastain is an early 90s Tammy Faye Bakker, primping before a mirror in preparation for an interview. As she explains, both her lips and eyes are lined with permanent ink, and…
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Excellent intentions and important subject matter are toppled by overwrought melodrama in the busy immigration polemic Blue Bayou. It gives one no pleasure to declare that a film so ambitious, timely and good-hearted—about family separation and deportation due to draconian (lack of) immigration policy—plays…
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The inside of his motel room must be shrouded in pristine white cloth, which he retrieves, impeccably folded, from his suitcase, never overpacked and containing but a handful of neutral, fitted suits. At the nightly poker table he recedes, an enigma with a winning…
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