Director Rob Marshall and Disney had high expectations and a bit of skepticism riding on their adaptation of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s beloved 1986 musical Into the Woods, and what initially seemed an unwieldy combination—a fractured trio of fairy tales where love doesn’t…
Read MoreWhat do you do when you’re mired in a painful past and your identity is so shaped by regret and emptiness that you no longer recognize yourself? If you’re Cheryl Strayed, you draw a line in the sand—one that reaches 1100 miles along the…
Read MoreWe know how he did it—on January 26, 1996, billionaire eccentric John Eleuthere du Pont shot and killed, in cold blood, Olympic wrestler and gold medalist Dave Schultz. But why did he? Foxcatcher, Bennett Miller’s arresting new picture on the subject, has some very…
Read MoreThe Theory of Everything is both a fascinating biopic of renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking and a complex love story told from the perspective of Hawking’s long-suffering wife, Jane, whose memoirs informed this portrait of a marriage that nearly made it through everything, and two…
Read MoreAn imperfect masterwork still qualifies as one, and Christopher Nolan’s transcendent magnum opus Interstellar is perhaps the most thematically and technically ambitious mainstream movie in memory, one so demanding for its 169-minute running time that at times it feels like a final exam, but…
Read MoreBirdman, Alejandro Gonzalez-Inarritu’s audacious backstage redemption tale, is at once an incisive portrait of the artistic ego and a rage against the dying of the (spot)light, a personal movie about art as savior, second chances, aging, irrelevance and an indictment of a fickle industry…
Read MoreThe aptly titled new war picture Fury, starring Brad Pitt as an American sergeant leading a band of GIs through Germany at the close of the World War II, is a machine of a movie that storms both the battlefields and the emotions. Fashioned…
Read MoreComprised of two distinct features and running 195 minutes, The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Her/Him is both too much and not enough. Arriving a mere few weeks after the film’s initial release, a 122-minute version titled The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them, the new…
Read MoreToo clever by half and too broad to be genuinely funny, the contrived family dramedy This Is Where I Leave You favors situational contrivances over honest characters. It’s the sign of a distinctly modern movie such as this that after winding us up with…
Read MoreSomeone is murdering the wives of New York drug dealers in the diabolical mystery A Walk Among the Tombstones, an appealingly low-key detective thriller featuring a top-of-his-game Liam Neeson as independent private detective Matthew Scudder, author Lawrence Block’s hardboiled crusader featured in 17 of…
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