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
There isn’t a lot to say about The Bye-Bye Man, except that it capably fits into the early year dumping ground of movies in which studios have little faith, and cheaply made horror films that spring up to make a quick buck. This entry, which…
Read More
There is nothing wrong with a feel-good movie that does its job well, and that is what you get with Hidden Figures, the inspiring new movie about the real heroes behind NASA’s space race that manages to be both smart and entertaining in its…
Read More
Denzel Washington brings August Wilson’s celebrated Fences to the screen in a sum-of-its-parts movie adaptation both eloquent and long-winded, thematically expansive yet, at times, claustrophobic. Working from a screenplay completed by Wilson prior to his 2005 death, Washington takes a traditional, almost reverential approach—perhaps…
Read More
It’s a rarity in American film to observe some of the best actors working, delivering some of the most powerful dialogue of the last century—and in close-up, no less—but that is precisely what you get in Fences, Denzel Washington’s screen version of August Wilson’s…
Read More
Spaced out stinker Passengers, which has been pushed hard by marketing its two big stars, is a confused and altogether empty fantasy that takes place on a huge ship careening through deep space. Isolation, love, companionship, stalking—all enroute to a newly inhabitable planet? Why…
Read More
In a bravura act of movie invention, filmmaker Damien Chazelle has fashioned a throwback that’s also contemporary; a musical that is intensely dramatic; a love story of élan and heartbreak; and one of the best-ever movie love letters to starry-eyed, pure of heart struggling…
Read More
