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…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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Eddie Redmayne gives the year’s best male performance in The Danish Girl, a fascinating portrait of real-life transgender pioneer Lile Elbe, the Danish painter who came to realize that her gender identity and physical body were incongruous and who, with neither the acceptance of…
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As an audacious warning alarm about Black-on-Black violence in Chicago and using every tool in his arsenal, Spike Lee’s high-wire act Chi-Raq is many things—social parable wrapped in sex satire piqued with music, spoken verse, direct address, set pieces, lavish color, high comedy and…
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It may not have been necessary, but Billy Ray’s Secret in Their Eyes, a remake of the Oscar winning 2009 Argentine mystery about politics, love and a murder that takes its toll on a handful of inextricably linked characters, is certainly not without merit.…
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The Hollywood blacklist gets a superfluous treatment in Jay Roach’s Trumbo, a too much, not enough examination of Tinseltown careers destroyed by MCarthy-era communist witch hunts, and one—screenwriter Dalton Trumbo—who rose from the ashes even while his personal spoils lingered. As directed by Roach,…
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