Well, that was a surprise. The plan seemed clear enough: over the course of Prometheus and Covenant, the Alien franchise had gotten a little too far from its nightmarish roots — body horror, monster scares, and corporate malfeasance giving way to existential searches for meaning, the war of creation vs. …
In 2006, tech-friendly social worker Dan Cohen got the bright idea to bring iPods loaded with personalized playlists to elderly nursing home patients suffering from disconnection. Whether because of Alzheimer's, dementia, or schizophrenia, these people had lost touch with the world, and with themselves. In at least a few instances, …
A lumbering, illustrated hagiography of the slain rap phenom Tupac Shakur that, in its efforts to exalt and exonerate the man, reduces him to a strangely passive figure: a sweet, goodhearted, brilliant kid to whom bad things keep happening. The structure leans heavily on reporters — whether conducting interviews, appearing …
Viewers of a certain age may remember Robert Redford as one of the great handsome men of cinema. The sun-kissed skin, the wind-tousled hair, the little-boy smile that let you know he couldn’t lose. Like the title says, all is lost. Disaster rouses an solo yachtsman from comfortable sleep: a …
What if Tennessee Williams wrote a play about William Shakespeare? You know, something claustrophobic and overheated, with families made miserable by mores trapped indoors together, clawing away at each other with conversation until painful secrets from the long-buried past start bleeding out of the wounds. And then what if he …
Colin Hanks’s documentary about the rise and fall of Tower Records wants you to understand that it was not merely the digital devilry of file-sharing services like Napster that killed the once-mighty retail chain. But it’s so busy pointing a fascinated camera at founder Russ Solomon’s good-times-good-friends-good-music early days with …
How can a story laden with this much betrayal and corruption feel this cheerful? Welcome to Hawaii. Bradley Cooper smiles his way through the shenanigans as the wounded hero (physically, morally, spiritually, professionally) who has to choose which parts are worth healing and which can be cut away. Happily, he …
It’s possible that the eight- to ten-year-old set has not been sufficiently exposed to Lady Gaga. This should fix that. It’s also possible that comedian David Cross was not yet bereft of human dignity. This should fix that, too. And in case you’d forgotten how much you loved Tom Hanks …
What looks at first like it might be a 92-minute commercial for a venerable luxury hotel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side turns out to be something quite different — something not entirely opposite, but certainly something more melancholy and elegiac than a simple celebration of refined indulgence. Documentarian Matthew Miele …
Generation Y gets its web-slinger, and as cash-grab reboots go, it’s not bad. This time, high-school dweeb Peter Parker isn’t such a nice guy at the outset: he’s a New Yorker, after all, and on top of that, he’s an orphan with a dad-shaped chip on his shoulder. And he’s …
Every superhero movie faces a choice: the man or the mask? Sure, there’s interplay, but ultimately, one feeds the other, storywise. Judging by the either goofy or nonsensical nature of the (admittedly balletic) fight scenes in he Amazing Spider-Man 2, you might be tempted to say that this sequel to …
Over the past three years, Michael Keaton has created memorable characters in Birdman, Spotlight, The Founder, and even Spider-Man: Homecoming. So maybe he’s earned the right to bluster and snarl his way through this creaky, clichéd thriller about nuclear-minded terrorists, the secretly soulful killing machines who must hunt them down, …
In the early '60s, a racially integrated group of Northern college students decided to head south on buses, traveling from town to town, violating segregation laws, and peacefully accepting the sometimes horrific consequences.