A vacationing family is terrorized by doppelgangers in Jordan Peele’s sophomore outing Us, a tense thriller featuring a high-bar performance from star Lupita Nyong’o and Peele’s signature blend of comedy, terror and social allegory that, for a while at least, proves an enjoyable ride. Peele,…
Read More
She’s not exactly looking for love, but she’s open to it. And while she’s not quite lonely, no one in her life seems to have much use for her. She spends most of her time alone, but as she sees it, that’s not necessarily…
Read More
Love, in Michael Glover Smith’s buoyant roundelay Rendezvous in Chicago, doesn’t come easy for a handful of the city’s paramours, but when it does—it’s a treat for them, and us. In a sixty-nine-minute ensemble romantic comedy charting three couples meeting, committing and splitting, Smith…
Read More
Julia Roberts pulls out all the stops in a career high performance—one that reminds us how much empathy we can have for an actor we hold dear—in Ben is Back, a searing look at the bond between a mother and son over 24-hours of…
Read More
Joel Edgerton’s Boy Erased, one of the year’s best-acted movies, is an “issue” movie done so well it far surpasses another well-meaning, troubled teen picture this season. Both movies are about real-life teens in crisis—one forced into gay conversion “therapy,” the other in the…
Read More
“No one in their right mind would do what you do,” journalist Marie Colvin is told late in A Private War, an absorbing character study of a woman who lived, and not always fearlessly, in harm’s way on the front lines of the bloodiest…
Read More
The mystique of Lisbeth Salander—that iconic, proto-feminist hacker turned crusader against the evil that men do—has been mostly sidelined in The Girl in the Spider’s Web, a disappointingly routine action picture that miscalculates by diminishing Salander’s knife-edged persona, her propensity for dispensing grim justice…
Read More
