At the outset of director Yorgos Lanthimos’ gorgeous, witty, bawdy, bruising, depressing, and disheartening romp amid the English royals, Emma Stone — playing Abigail, a clever girl from a fallen family — faces an unpleasant choice: either tolerate the wretched sexual attentions of a man or be cast out into …
He's an aimless rascal who never got on with his (recently deceased) dad. She's a Hasidic Jew trapped in a loveless marriage and a stifling culture. Well, not exactly loveless: her husband really wants to make her happy, but he can't figure out why she wants to listen to modern …
Director and co-writer Jason Banker's story of post-rape trauma is deeply unpleasant (you were expecting maybe a cheerful story, one in which Chekhov's gun somehow doesn't go off?), but thoughtfully, creatively so. Amy (co-writer Amy Everson) has always been crafty, but recent events have led her to lovingly fashion alarming …
There’s only one fence in director and star Denzel Washington’s presentation of August Wilson’s play about an outsized personality and the world he finds himself squeezed into: the pine-plank job that trash man, father, and former Negro Leagues baseball star Troy Maxson builds around his backyard over the course of …
An all-star history of the environmental movement. Narration by Robert Redford and Meryl Streep! The Sierra Club! Love Canal! Earth Day! Greenpeace! Amazon Deforestation! Global Warming! Don't ask for a coherent point, except maybe that different people have cared about the environment in different ways and for different reasons at …
There is one great scene in Pixar’s latest oceanic offering: when forgetful heroine Dory finds herself lost and alone — really, totally alone — in the darkening murk of an ocean that feels as vast as it is empty. Her profound distress, her response to that distress, and the eventual …
The titular Oscar, one of the only survivors of a terrifying massacre during middle years of the nearly four-decade Guatemalan civil war, appears at the opening and the closing of Ryan Suffern’s documentary, and provides the harrowing tale with some heart. But the head, hands, guts and legs belong to …
A straight-up Boys’ Own adventure yarn, set sincerely and squarely in early ’50s New England but gussied up with plenty of 21st-century StormWave CGI. A monster winter storm causes not one but two oil tankers to split in half off the coast, and so many people are busy attending to …
Iranian director Asghar Farhadi (A Separation) also co-writes this story of premarital disillusionment. Any time you get to see a radiant bride-to-be (Taraneh Alidoosti) try on her dress and admire her reflection at the outset, you know that bliss is in the crosshairs. (It’s an even bigger tip-off than the …
Heroine Monica is a drug-addicted whore who was pimped out by her sexually abusive father in order to pay his debts, and when we meet her, she’s in her underwear, spread-eagled face down on the floor in a mid-range shot that also captures the basement-style squalor of her living arrangements. …
Gravity used space to explore the existential alienation brought on by the death of a child. The Martian used space to explore human ingenuity and drive at the level of nuts and bolts and chemistry. Director Damien Chazelle’s latest gives us a mashup of the two that is sadly less …
Charlie Day is a nice-guy teacher (with a sweet kid and a pregnant wife) in a high school that demands educators who look like Ice Cube and talk with his brand of menace and authority. But even Mr. Cube is not immune to the degradations of Senior Prank Day, and …
Irene (Margherita Buy) works for a company that evaluates luxury hotels. This means that you will see many luxury hotels over the course of the film, and they are indeed luxurious. Personal butlers, spa treatments, motorized curtains, palatial bathrooms, scented sheets — Irene sees all and judges all. (You almost …