“Octave”—a universal movie about making peace with past to understand the present—is an independent production helmed by first-time feature director Serge Ioan Celebidachi.…
Simultaneously about everything and nothing, Luca Guadagnino’s luscious A Bigger Splash is a glossy paen to the lifestyles of the rich and famous, here the seaside affairs of an international rock star (Tilda Swinton) entangled in a hothouse of temptation. What it lacks in…
How can there be so little to say about a movie that tries—so hard—to do so much? Perhaps because Captain America: Civil War, the latest Marvel cash cow, is an overstuffed and altogether unnecessary movie that throws so much at us that the only…
There is simply no reason to care about anything in Green Room, an exercise in nihilism that begins with grit before quickly devolving into unrestrained violence minus the empathy or substance to give it consequence. Written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier as a sophomore…
Everybody Wants Some!!, Richard Linklater’s ode to brotherly love circa 1980 Southeast Teas State University, is a sex comedy, rite of passage, gentle love story and a movie that tries to get at the core of both bromance and romance about what it means…
The spirit of John Cassavettes informs the first great film of 2016, Trey Edward Schultz’s lacerating family drama Krisha, an acutely observed study of addiction and resentment and a showcase for his real-life aunt, character actress Krisha Fairchild, who tears into her first lead…
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…