Full disclosure—movie and pop star Hailee Steinfeld makes me feel like a teenage girl in all the best ways, not least because she can turn a pop song inside out with fully felt vocals and a music video persona sincere enough to let you…
Arrival, starring Amy Adams as a linguistics professor called upon to decipher the language of an alien race, is a science fiction film filled with heady ideas, emotional currents and a sense of discovery that engages both the brain and heart as it eventually…
They don’t make them like they used to, except when they do. Hacksaw Ridge is one of the year’s best-constructed, most passionate movies, a true story of uncommon bravery both on and off the World War II battlefield, one of a conscientious objector who…
The Light Between Oceans is the sort of lackluster movie only really talented people can make—pedigreed, mounted with conviction and an earnest to a fault. Unfortunately, it is also a mawkish soap opera with little in the way of real substance, and one that…
As a disabled, Detroit Army vet beset upon by a trio of young burglars in Don’t Breathe, star Stephen Lang gives a maniacal performance, deftly balancing the physical with the cerebral. In the visceral thriller directed by Fede Alvarez (The Evil Dead), a reclusive…
The idea of playing Meryl Streep’s right-hand man in any movie must be both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, you get to work with the best; the other, try not to be eclipsed when she gives a performance as wonderful as…
Young stars Logan Lerman and Sarah Gadon create a palpable, doomed love in James Schamus’ superb screen adaptation of Philip Roth’s 2008 novel Indignation, and when I sat down with them recently in a bustling Chicago restaurant, they pretty much put me into the…
The modestly creepy Lights Out is a sometimes-effective horror picture with two things going for it—the introduction of an intriguing movie villain and a terrific performance from Mario Bello as a distraught widow being manipulated by a vengeful entity. In a movie all about…
Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie, is sheer lunacy and exactly what fans of the early 90s BBC series are looking for in a movie update—creator and star Jennifer Saunders and co-star Joanna Lumley returning to their boozy, cynical, iconic glory. And that’s about it. It…
The new Star Trek picture not so boldly goes where the franchise has gone, several times, before. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, because director Justin Lin’s Star Trek Beyond is one great looking movie that manages to be sometimes fun, even as…