You have to hand it to Yorgos Lanthimos. After taking the Oscar season by storm with his ribald liberation saga Poor Things, the celebrated writer-director has returned to his anarchic origins with the misanthropic Kinds of Kindness, a marathon of twisted deadpan and gleeful…
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A taxi driver and his passenger unexpectedly bond in writer-director Christy Hall’s Daddio, starring Sean Penn and Dakota Johnson on an extended trip from JFK to Midtown, one yielding plenty of talk and transformation. It’s a two-character “small” picture with a few bigger ideas…
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Jeff Nichols’ new film The Bikeriders charts the birth and rise of a fictional 1960s-era Chicago motorcycle club named the Vandals, as seen through the eyes of three compelling actors: Tom Hardy as the gang’s founder and leader, Austin Butler as his young protégé…
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Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders, a thundering paen to the birth of American motorcycle culture, is high-gear style and attitude eclipsing a story stuck in neutral. Inspired by Danny Lyon’s 1968 photography book of the same title—which chronicled the circa 60s Chicago exploits of biker…
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The construct of identity—things we believe ourselves to be, limiting notions of what we could become and the potential for self-evolution—power Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, a feather-light comedy about a mild-mannered college professor who moonlights as a phony hit man, only to fall hard…
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Would you be interested in seeing a film with little plot, depth, character or structure? How about a horror film lacking suspense but prizing extreme gore over all else? If the answer to those questions is “I’ll pass,” then steer clear of In a…
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In 2015, George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road arrived with the force of a thunderclap, reinvigorating a franchise that helped to define the 80s’ action movie while catapulting Mel Gibson to stardom as a rogue ex-cop turned solitary avenger in a dystopian wasteland. The…
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Watching Pamela Adlon’s razor-sharp comedy Babes recently with a packed theatrical audience signaled an unmistakable return to that collective movie audience mojo—enjoying a joke and enjoying that others are enjoying it too—which these days is hard to come by in a challenging moment of…
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A wiser man than I once said that without heart there can be no art. By this barometer, Jane Schoenbrun’s arthouse curio I Saw the TV Glow is hardly the instant masterpiece it’s been inexplicably ordained. The picture may be a conceptual thesis—but it…
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As movie-movie in-jokes go, David Leitch’s divertingly bombastic The Fall Guy has as much genuine reverence for its subject as gentle cynicism for its industry. That it (ever so) works is a testament to the aggressive charm offensive of star Ryan Gosling, driving a…
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