Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again, an unexpected good time sequel, takes some time to settle into—the songs aren’t quite as good as the first go-round and there’s patent silliness in nearly every frame—but the anything-to-please eagerness, informing every production number, one-liner and candy…
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Debra Granik’s heartbreaker Leave No Trace is an unorthodox father-daughter story about family, adolescence and community, emotionally potent all the way and with a lot of compassion for the values of rural folks and those who choose to live off-the-grid. It is also a…
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A terrific Vera Farmiga and Christopher Plummer drive the family road movie Boundaries, about a hard-won reconciliation between a father and daughter who, try as they might, have never been able to make their relationship work. Written and directed by Shana Feste, it’s a…
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Across four features, writer-director Shana Feste has displayed a compassion for her characters that defines her a distinctly humanist filmmaker, one who writes people she dearly cares for and then pushes them into difficult places. Whether parents grieving a son’s untimely death, a country and…
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Hereditary, about a troubled family coming apart after a tragedy leads to an intrusion of the supernatural, is among the best, and rarest, kinds of scary movies, both a thoroughly observed examination of personal and human dynamics and diabolical descent into a place so…
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Leigh Whannell’s Upgrade, the surprise of the commercial moviegoing year, is a sleeper of a picture that outpaces the season’s big Hollywood effects movies with ideas and craft and moderate scale, a cautionary sci-fi actioner about AI, vengeance and what we are losing in…
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Writer-director Leigh Whannell makes art out of pulp in Upgrade, the year’s most inventive and entertaining movie, a mash up of Verhoeven, Cronenberg, Cameron, Crichton and a touch of Clarke. A freewheeling, near future, sci-fi actioner that manages to incorporate a spectrum of influences…
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Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, about a reverend’s crisis of faith, is the most narratively and thematically ambitious American film this year. A meditation on spiritual ennui and glimpse into the mind of a bleak character peering into the abyss without comfort, Schrader’s film is…
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At 72, Paul Schrader has crafted one of his finest pictures in First Reformed, the story of a bereft reverend, played by Ethan Hawke, who undergoes a dark night of the soul before perhaps—or not—achieving transcendence. One of the few great pictures this year…
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