Lean on Pete works on the strength of a terrific performance from young star Charlie Plummer as a down-on-his luck teen who befriends a past-his-prime racehorse. The pair teams up for a leisurely trek across the West in a modest movie that has a…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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,…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
