Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is an austere exercise with a single idea—that evil deeds can be compartmentalized while their perpetrators lead otherwise innocuously guilt-free lives—stretched out for 106 minutes. Deploying a theme applicable to many of history’s villains, Glazer’s glacial treatise on…
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Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard superbly navigate challenging psychological terrain in a tough, hopeful picture.…
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Ferrari, Michael Mann’s moment-in-time biopic starring Adam Driver as an aging Enzo Ferrari in the 1957 crosshairs of heated personal and business dramas, is a sum of its parts picture enlivened by a thrilling recreation of the thousand-mile Mille Miglia car race, worth seeing…
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With The Boys in the Boat, George Clooney’s ninth directorial outing, the actor turned filmmaker has crafted a handsome, appealingly traditional throw-back movie with a reverence for both historical context and bygone true life sports movies done well a few decades ago. A late…
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In her 2020 Sundance-winning The Forty Year-Old Version, New York playwright Radha Blank wrote and directed a close-to-reality self-portrait of a Black writer and artist in a state of continual invention. Her dilemma? The Broadway purse strings, held by affluent, liberal white producers and…
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In Paul King’s sunny, funny Wonka, Timothée Chalamet steps into the very big Roald Dahl-Gene Wilder shoes belonging to the world’s most famous chocolatier for a pleasing, throw-back musical of genuine sweetness. It turns out those shoes fit quite well, and far better than…
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This year’s prize for movie audacity goes to Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’ fiercely realized, exuberantly funny liberation odyssey starring Emma Stone in a career-high performance as an instantly iconic screen character, one created as a companion for man but whose appetite for self-discovery challenges…
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Compulsively compelling Eileen—an offbeat period character study turned thriller of a shy young secretary at a Massachusetts juvenile correctional facility seduced by the allure of a newly appointed psychiatrist—is either an impressive genre straddler or an uneven potboiler. I couldn’t decide which (and perhaps…
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Saltburn, a not exactly eat-the-rich skewering by way of Patricia Highsmith, is a glossy shockwave that finds Oscar-winning writer-director Emerald Fennell casting a seductive spell before twisting her sophomore picture into a somewhat reductive narrative knot. Despite a bigger budget and plenty of talent…
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Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein picture Maestro, the actor-director’s follow-up to his lauded 2017 version of A Star is Born, finds him confidently back in the musical arena for an unexpected, eras spanning scenes from a (musical) marriage. A Leonard Bernstein biopic turned domestic drama?…
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