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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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,…
Read More
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…
Read More
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,…
Read More
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…
Read More
An exercise in cinematography and art direction—and little else—by director Gore Verbinski, A Cure for Wellness is an early candidate for Bloated Movie of the Year. A miscalculation that thinks it’s bold and inventive but is actually labored and routine, with an unconvincing lead…
Read More
