Our Brand is Crisis

Sandra Bullock is the world’s savviest political consultant in David Gordon Green’s underwhelming satire Our Brand is Crisis, a picture so telegraphed and unenlightening that its biggest crime, ultimately, is merely playing it safe, edgy as it thinks it is.  There is nothing new…

Read More

Room

Parent-child intimacy has rarely been so vividly etched in the movies as in the moving Room, in which we witness a mother and young son locked away in a single-room hellhole before escaping to a completely new set of challenges in the outside world.…

Read More

99 Homes

More than any other filmmaker of the moment, Ramin Bahrani charts stories of disenfranchised men who face moral quagmires afoul of the American dream.   In 2013’s superb At Any Price, Dennis Quaid was a Midwestern farmer who would stop at nothing to preserve the…

Read More

Straight Outta Compton

The exhilaration of Straight Outta Compton, one of the year’s best movies, is that of a good story, well-told with vivid performances and a stirring, contemporary sociopolitical context. Charting the rise, fall and rise of seminal hip hop forerunners N.W.A., director F. Gary Gray…

Read More

Samba

Samba, the good-hearted story of a Senegalese immigrant in Paris fighting deportation, is a sum of its parts picture. Written and directed by the French duo Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano from the novel Samba pour la France by Delphine Coulin, it’s a movie…

Read More

Teriminator: Genisys

If any remaining proof of Hollywood’s creative bankruptcy should be required, the more-is-less Terminator: Genisys should put the issue to bed once and for all. An all-out assault on both the senses and storytelling, this overblown mess of a movie appropriates entire chunks of…

Read More

The Overnight

A  good-natured sex farce about the insecure male ego and flirting with marital experimentation, The Overnight is a cheerfully raunchy ode to ennui and swinging that is revolutionary in its own small ways.  Light as a feather but no less enjoyable—actually quite enjoyable—this broad…

Read More

Insidious: Chapter 3

The latest entry in the haunted family saga of otherworldly entities and vengeful spirits, Insidious: Chapter 3 is notable for one reason, and a good one—veteran character actress Lin Shaye as reticent medium Elise Rainier.  If awards were given for performances in genre films—and…

Read More

Mad Max: Fury Road

The most imaginative and directorially accomplished movie of the year, Mad Max: Fury Road is a hell of a vision from director George Miller, 70 and at the peak of his powers, upending the action genre by delivering an antithetical, feminist war cry that…

Read More

The Clouds of Sils Maria

Oliver Assays’ Clouds of Sils Maria is an opaque conceptual trip, a thematically dense exercise in self and industry reflections, a nod to both Fassbinder and Bergman and a showcase for its actresses, namely Juliette Binoche as an internationally renown actress undergoing an identity…

Read More
1 31 32 33 34 35 46