An odd amalgam of Calvinist tradition and bedeviled horror, The Witch won the director’s prize for filmmaker Robert Eggers at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival for its atmospheric tale of outcast Puritans who settle on the edge of a haunted wood before hysteria and…
The first terrific movie of 2016, the Coen Brothers’ lavishly inspired Hollywood satire Hail, Caesar! is one of their very best comedies, a gleaming love letter to the old Hollywood studio system that both evangelizes the transformative magic of the movies while affectionately critiquing…
You might think that horror pictures about demonic dolls have worn out their welcome, but The Boy, a surprisingly creepy and unpretentious little movie about an American nanny who takes a job in England for a very unorthodox family, delivers the shivery goods. It…
As adult dramas go—and there are so few today it seems out of line not to be generous—45 years, starring Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtney as a longtime married couple whose relationship fissures when the past intervenes, is tasteful, well-acted, sincere and so low-key…
You really have to hand it to director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, whose films never cozy up to their audiences, instead demanding a partnership that can be agonizing in the moment but always haunting, enlightening even, upon reflection. With a handful of rigorously commanding movies under his belt, from…
1. Brooklyn – John Crowley’s magnificent Brooklyn is a study in contrasts, between small Irish towns and big American cities, nationals and immigrants, naiveté and womanhood, former homes and new horizons, an Italian-American love and an Irish suitor. It’s also one of the best…
Todd Haynes’ Carol, as gorgeously rendered an evocation of star-crossed love as the movies has maybe known, is a meticulously mounted, finely felt and beautifully acted examination of the costs of self-actualization in an unforgiving world. With a screenplay by Phyllis Nagy from Patricia Highsmith’s…
David O. Russell’s Joy gives Jennifer Lawrence a honey of a role as the overstretched, unfulfilled head of a zany household who, with a little resourcefulness and a lot of drive, reversed her fortune to become the personification of the American Dream. Lawrence, already…
Filmmaker Todd Haynes is one of the few contemporary American auteurs, and inarguably the least celebrated. Of that finite club, it may be true that Haynes is the most eclectic, artistic and perhaps even visionary. His low profile should change with his new picture,…
The most important thing to know about Star Wars: The Force Awakens is that it returns a sense of fun to a floundering franchise—one that also happens to be the best loved movie property in history. With two new characters and a handful of…