Michel Franco’s sociopolitical nightmare New Order edges toward an uncomfortable, close-to-reality plausibility where social hierarchies erode amidst a working-class revolt and descent into barbarism. The French-Mexican production is a visually arresting thriller that is cruel, crude and pointed – harrowing and intriguing, undone by…
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What happens in a marital separation when one person moves on and the other is still committed? The power of the superb heartland drama The Killing of Two Lovers comes from its point of view on a failing marriage, told from the perspective of…
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A farce borne of humiliation that achieves the tension of a tautly constructed horror film, Emma Seligman’s Shiva Baby is a smart comedy of errors about a young collegiate returning home for a pressure cooker Jewish funeral only to contend with a cavalcade of…
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The masterstroke of the dementia drama The Father, co-adapted by director and playwright Florian Zeller and the great Christopher Hampton, is one of perspective. A byzantine puzzle about an octogenarian in mental decline, it puts us directly in senility’s way courtesy of a sterling…
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According to a recent New York Times calculation, the per prisoner cost of Guantanamo Bay detention is approximately $13 million—a hefty sum for the thirty-nine existing detainees from more than fifty nationalities, the majority from the Middle East. And while the debate over closing…
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The primary reason (perhaps the only one) to see French Exit is a glorious Michelle Pfeiffer, one of the few remaining great American movie stars, in an ace performance that sustains a sometimes too precious picture that is an altogether mixed bag. Picture opens…
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One of the season’s most pleasant surprises, Regina King’s One Night in Miami, based on the play by Kemp Powers suggesting a 1964 meeting of minds between titans Jim Brown, Malcom X, Cassius Clay and Sam Cooke, Jr., is a superbly acted and thought-provoking movie,…
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In News of the World, based on the 2016 novel by Paulette Jiles about a Civil War vet roaming the Old West performing the news of the day to paying crowds in tiny towns across Texas, there is something almost comforting in the simple…
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Has enough time truly passed to reboot 2003’s backwoods horror hit Wrong Turn (which itself aped scores of earlier films with the same general story)? Modest points in this version go to screenwriter Alan McElroy and director Mike P. Nelson who competently mount a…
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