The central visual motif in A Quiet Place, John Krasinski’s heartland horror story of a distant future where marauding creatures lurk, is the “shhh” of an index finger covering the lips. The actors barely make a sound, and neither does the audience for a…
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Steven Spielberg’s visionary Ready Player One straddles old and new—post-modern and nostalgic—in a conceptual feat of imagination equal parts endearing and fatiguing. Guess which one wins? Despite its loving homage to 80s pop culture, the master has crafted a check-box movie with only a…
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Based on the wildly successful 2012 novel about a disembodied soul that inhabits a new host each day only to fall in love—and want to settle down—with a smart, lonely high school girl, Every Day is, for a movie about teenagers, as ambitiously conceived…
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The merits of Sebastian Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman are primarily a deeply human performance from revelatory star Daniela Vega and a well-observed portrait of quiet dignity in the face of an unforgiving world. It is a movie, in its own way, as much about…
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A powerhouse Diane Kruger drives Fatih Akin’s German thriller In the Fade, a gripping descent into grief and revenge courtesy of the star’s 2017 Cannes-winning performance. Kruger, in every scene of the film, acts with a startling rawness, clawing deeply into the emotions of…
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Paul Thomas Anderson’s ravishing Phantom Thread, featuring Daniel Day Lewis as a celebrated 1950s London fashion designer whose world is turned upside down upon the arrival of a new muse, is an exceedingly well-made excursion into the mind of an obsessive undone by, perhaps,…
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The crown movie jewel of 2017, Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name is a masterpiece of first love and heartbreak and an immediate classic, one of the best pictures ever made about the coming of age of a teenaged boy and of such…
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A rousing entry in the Star Wars saga, Rian Johnson’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi, is a solid series installment and a tad better follow-up to 2015’s modestly fun J.J. Abrams helmed Star Wars: The Force Awakens. That picture, with its feminist, Luke Skywalker…
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James Franco’s The Disaster Artist is an unexpectedly near-great movie and one of the funniest pictures ever made about the process of making movies. In telling its loopy, endearing tale of ambition minus talent in Hollywood—of which there’s certainly no shortage—it manages to lampoon both…
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