Olivier Assays’ startling new character study, Personal Shopper, is a movie about loss and guilt and identity, enervated by a terrific Kristen Stewart. It’s also an offbeat ghost story that subverts genre to get at something deeper, and more mysterious. Their first collaboration together,…
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Magical and transporting, Bill Condon’s live-action adaptation of the famous “tale as old as time” is a complete success on all counts. Beauty and the Beast looks great, sounds great and generates real enchantment. What’s not to like? It’s been 26-years since Disney’s now…
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Descent into insanity or embrace of true nature? The audacious, outrageous French horror film Raw is as unsettling as movies come, a full-blooded freak show with patently serious psychological currents, convicted performances and a lot on its mind about its uncomfortable constitution of feminism,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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