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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As a targeted piece of provocation, Emerald Fennel’s Promising Young Woman is a zeitgeist bullseye. A scathing condemnation of rape culture pitched as a darkly comic thriller for the #MeToo era, it features a never better Carey Mulligan as an avenging angel on a…
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The chief reason to see Another Round is a terrific performance from Mads Mikkelsen, teaming up once again with The Hunt director Thomas Vinterberg for a Danish drama with a provocative premise—what if the answer to a mid-life crisis is to forego antidepressants and…
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Netflix and Ryan Murphy’s exuberant new movie adaptation of the 2016 Broadway hit The Prom, about a troupe of down-on-their-luck Broadway babies turned social justice warriors swooping into rural Indiana to save a high school prom from cancellation, is a broad, tongue-firmly-in-cheek confection both…
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