A sober but not-quite-somber drone drama that ably portrays the complicated moral calculus involved in modern warfare. (General Sherman said that war is cruelty and there is no use trying to reform it, but there persists the sense that we have to try anyway, especially when we’re firing missiles into …
Writer-director Nicolas Pesce’s debut feels unnervingly like a Diane Arbus photo that’s been stretched into a film. Which is to say, it’s unnerving — a shadowy black-and-white (well, black-and-gray) image of an older, less homogenized, more frequently grotesque world, where even beauty and innocence may serve to heighten a sense …
Something very close to a sex comedy for grownups. John Turturro writes, directs, and stars in the carefully crafted, beautifully shot story of Fioravante, a strong, silent-type florist who agrees to do a favor for an old friend (Woody Allen) whose NYC bookstore has just gone out of business. It …
Poor Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne, sensitive bordering on priggish): all this English wizard wants to do is protect the world’s magical animals from “the most vicious creature on earth: humans.” But doing so means traveling to America, where even the wizards are against him — right off the boat, he’s …
J.K. Rowling goes full Dickens (or at least Dickensian) in an absolute dreary slog of a story full of mysterious bloodlines, secret and/or forbidden and/or frustrated love affairs, unfeeling social mores, class struggle, wretched bureaucracy, fractured families, and awkward allegories. Oh, and a big, weird speech from Johnny Depp as …
J.K. Rowling goes full Dickens (or at least Dickensian) in an absolute dreary slog of a story full of mysterious bloodlines, secret and/or forbidden and/or frustrated love affairs, unfeeling social mores, class struggle, wretched bureaucracy, fractured families, and awkward allegories. Oh, and a big, weird speech from Johnny Depp as …
J.K. Rowling goes full Dickens (or at least Dickensian) in an absolute dreary slog of a story full of mysterious bloodlines, secret and/or forbidden and/or frustrated love affairs, unfeeling social mores, class struggle, wretched bureaucracy, fractured families, and awkward allegories. Oh, and a big, weird speech from Johnny Depp as …
Josh Trank, who smartly darkened up the superhero genre with his small-scale angry-teen film Chronicle, goes big, dumbs down, and ultimately gets overwhelmed with this reboot about three fine actors (Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Michael B. Jordan) in search of a paycheck. Sorry, about four young people given astonishing powers …
Whatever quantity of soap froths up Thomas Vinterberg's presentation of Thomas Hardy's novel, it does nothing to fade out the lush colors that stain his gorgeous depiction of the author's English countryside. A lean and dimpled Carey Mulligan plays Bathsheba Everdene, a woman comfortable with solitude who still finds herself …
Bruiser Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson really ought to share star billing with his equally muscle bound Chevelle SS, but instead it goes to a greasy, ruined Billy Bob Thornton as the druggie cop assigned to stop Johnson's mission of (mostly) righteous revenge. The story, almost Western in its spareness, wants …
Ocean’s 11-style caper pic with more mayhem and darker skin. (Paul Walker’s whiteness here gleams like marble; his performance is similarly statuesque.) You get plenty of pretty machines and pretty ladies to go with your muscles, explosions, and bro-banter, but for a film stuffed with two of the hardest hardbodies …
The cars, they are very pretty. Vin Diesel's voice, it is very gravelly. The Rock, he is very large. (Though not as large as the muscle hauled in by the bad guys. Say this for the Fast & Furious franchise: it understands that it must keep topping itself in terms …
The 10th installment of the auto-action-adventure franchise opens strong, flashing back to the credulity-straining but undeniably thrilling “dragged vault” scene from Fast Five, but telling it from the bad guys’ perspective and prefacing it with a speech about how there is nothing a father wouldn’t do for his son Wait, …
Late in the race, the fast-cars franchise twists open the nitrous and roars back to life, thanks to a standout villain (an icy cool Charlize Theron), a pleasing measure of self-consciousness about its own tropes and themes (what is family, anyway?), and better writing and humor (nitrous is also laughing …
"We have a choice about how to tell sad stories," says 17-year-old Hazel Grace Lancaster (Shailene Woodley, adorable) at the outset. There is the Hollywood way to do it, of course. But, she says, "this is the truth. Sorry." She's not actually sorry, and notice is hereby served: this is …