Director Denis Villeneuve’s gorgeous, gargantuan sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1982 neon-noir about what happens when humanity creates its own superior. People are notoriously fragile, fickle things; if we go giving intelligence to something more durable and dependable, what do we have left to brag about? The answer, this time around: …
If it's not quite the Snow White retelling we've all been waiting for, it's certainly closer than some. For nearly its entire running time, Blanca Nieves feels like a bona fide fairy tale, the sort the Brothers Grimm might have collected had they been doing their work in 1920s Spain. …
Having played real-life artist Chet Baker in 2015’s Born to Be Blue, the spouse to real-life artist Maud Lewis in 2016’s Maudie, and fictional artist Tucker Crowe in his year’s Juliet, Naked, Ethan Hawke continues scratching his artisty itch by directing and co-writing a biopic of Blaze Foley that feels …
Rudolfo Anaya's coming-of-age story, set in 1940s New Mexico, never comes close to escaping its novelistic origins — do we really need a narrator to tell us that wise old woman Ultima "taught me to listen to the living earth and to feel complete in the mystery of its time"? …
Writer-stars Rafael Casal and Daveed Diggs shoot for the magical realism moon with a story of Oakland circa Right Now that strives mightily but not artfully to blend low comedy (vegan burgers at the Kwikway), high drama (white cop shooting black citizen), social commentary (white local v. black gentrifier), psychological …
In 2008, a group of bored SoCal teens — some well-off, others less so — started getting their kicks by breaking (actually, walking) into various minor celebrities' homes and stealing their clothes, their shoes, their jewelry, and even their accessories. This is a filmed re-enactment of that. Director Sofia Coppola …
Smart Southern Baptist boy swallows enough religious hypocrisy to sour him on Texas Baptist College and decides to head north to godless liberal-land (Reed College in Oregon). It isn’t long before he’s knocking back tall ones and knocking religion as primitive, but what do you know, love has a way …
Director, co-writer, and star Mathieu Amalric (Venus in Fur) serves up a short, slight, somewhat Frenchie crime story. Meaning: the runtime is 76 minutes, the interest comes mainly from the chopped-up-and-scrambled timeline, and there's a little ooh-la-la arthouse nudity at the outset to catch your interest. Everyone involved in this …
A Rube Goldberg machine delights because it employs a ridiculously complex mechanism to achieve a thoroughly simple — and ultimately insignificant — result. The insignificance is what makes the complexity funny. So it’s disconcerting, which is a nice way of saying mortifying, when the titular boy genius in Colin Treverrow’s …
The Dia de Los Muertos is a natural subject for a creepy-lite kiddie flick (alas, Tim Burton...). Sure, there are skulls, but they're made of sugar. Yes, there are graves, but they're covered with marigolds. Even the skeletons are dressed to blend in with the (still-fleshy) crowd. And it's all …
High school fantasy from director Olivia Wilde that takes care to hide its soft heart beneath a tough hide of sexy talk, modern mores, and somewhat subverted expectations. Taking the last part first: our heroines here are a couple of good girls (Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein) who spent high …
Filmed version of the popular Young Adult novel about a pretty blonde orphan girl (a cherubic Sophie Nelisse) who gets taken in by poor, decent German folk just as World War II gets underway. Papa (a hunched Geoffrey Rush) hides a Jew in the basement because the Jew's father once …
Answers the question, “What if X-Men’s story of Xavier and Magneto — mutant Others with remarkable powers trying to decide how to live in a normie world that hates and/or fears them — was played out, not between handsome youngsters (McEvoy and Fassbender) or dignified oldsters (Stewart and McKellan), but …
Quasi-biopic that asks the question, Why should the artist prize the love of a good woman when heroin will do just fine? One possible answer: if the woman is good enough, she won’t land you in an Italian prison the way drugs might. She might even give you the strength …
Surprise! Dreamworks’ latest is not simply an exercise in sticking Alec Baldwin’s Scotch-mellowed tycoon’s rasp in the mouth of a CGI infant and chuckling at the juxtaposition. Instead, this story of a boy’s troubles when his baby brother arrives serves as a rousing defense of familial love as a good …