How turn of the century British army officer ended up missing in the Amazon two decades later is the mystery of James Gray’s The Lost City of Z, an enigma of a movie that manages a unique paradox—it absorbs us even while it suspends…
The primary reason to see The Zookeeper’s Wife—and it’s a good one—is a moving performance from Jessica Chastain as real-life World War II heroine Antonina Zabinska, proprietor of the Warsaw Zoo and savior of more than 300 Jews rescued from the Warsaw Ghetto and…
You could do a lot worse for popcorn entertainment than the absurdly over-the-top—and intentionally so—The Fate of the Furious, the latest installment in the franchise that started as a muscle car (and muscle star) B-movie about 15 years ago and has now become a…
Highly original, fun, dark and even a bit scary, Colossal knows a thing or two about modern relationships, rock bottoms, the male ego and even Japanese Kaiju movies. In what may turn out to be the year’s most original film, writer-director Nacho Vigalondo and…
Danny Boyle, the celebrated British filmmaker who won the Oscar for 2008’s Slumdog Millionaire, makes pictures—notably Shallow Grave, 28 Days Later, The Beach, 127 Hours and Steve Jobs—that are visual and aural tapestries of throbbing momentum, precisely shot, edited and scored, aces at seizing…
Say what you will about Life—that’s it’s a knock-off, a B-movie, whatever—but you might also say that it’s tautly directed, well-acted and most importantly, has a creature that is truly scary. That’s not an easy thing to do in today’s CGI-infested landscape, but it…
Olivier Assays’ startling new character study, Personal Shopper, is a movie about loss and guilt and identity, enervated by a terrific Kristen Stewart. It’s also an offbeat ghost story that subverts genre to get at something deeper, and more mysterious. Their first collaboration together,…
Magical and transporting, Bill Condon’s live-action adaptation of the famous “tale as old as time” is a complete success on all counts. Beauty and the Beast looks great, sounds great and generates real enchantment. What’s not to like? It’s been 26-years since Disney’s now…
Descent into insanity or embrace of true nature? The audacious, outrageous French horror film Raw is as unsettling as movies come, a full-blooded freak show with patently serious psychological currents, convicted performances and a lot on its mind about its uncomfortable constitution of feminism,…
Jordan Peele’s debut feature Get Out is the first terrific commercial movie of 2017, a smart, inventive and consistently surprising social critique disguised as a commercial horror film that both provokes and entertains in equal measures. It’s been nearly fifty years since Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s…