Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood — The studio rep at the screening asked that both audience and critics not provide any spoilers for this, Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film. But Tarantino himself tells you everything you need to know on the “what happens” front with the title: the fairy-tale formulation that …
A star turn in Greta Gerwig’s Ladybird made it clear that Saoirse Ronan could play contemporary as well as period, so her performance here as a blushing English bride approaching her wedding bower in a seaside hotel circa 1962 shouldn’t pose any danger of pigeonholing. Still, she’s awfully good at …
There are a great many talking heads in this documentary from Nanfu Wang and Lynn Zhang that explores how exactly China went about preventing 338 million births between 1979 and 2015, when the one child policy ended and two children became the preferred number. (It seems there were no longer …
You don’t have to be a fan of the enormously popular manga/anime series starring a band of super-powered pirates to understand this largely self-contained feature film about their encounter with a gold-obsessed potentate/entertainer and his floating nation/party-zone. But you may need to be a fan to enjoy it. Everything but …
Less a movie than an extended, deadpan, highly stylized rant from director Jim Jarmusch. Adam (Tom Hiddleston) is a vampire. Adam listens to vinyl, collects vintage electric guitars, and makes awesome music that he doesn’t want to be recognized as his. Adam hides out on the ruined outskirts of Detroit …
For those who like their anime unhurried, elegiac, and episodic, here is the story of Taeko, a Japanese working girl in her late twenties who decides to spend her vacation working on a farm in the countryside. Possibly because, as a child, all her friends took vacations in the country, …
The celebrated novel arrives onscreen to buzzy talk of dual handjobs and whispered wonderings of "Why?" The film is an overexposed snapshot of an era: a pre-Boomer burst of sex, drugs, and be-bop, chronicled by young wannabe writer Sal Paradise (Sam Riley) and exemplified by his on-again, off-again travel buddy …
Small men, big bombs. Not for nothing do the three main movers and shakers in writer-director Christopher Nolan’s very magnum opus refer to themselves as “a humble physicist,” “a humble soldier,” and “a humble shoemaker.” (The first is Robert Oppenheimer, director of the American effort to beat the Nazis to …
Score one for mass culture: the animating forces behind The Simpsons aren't about to teach you anything new about the possibilities inherent in illustrated storytelling, but "Maggie Simpson in 'The Longest Daycare'" dominates this year's field through old-school craft and wit, and offers a politically topical Ayn Rand hook to …
While brevity demands that a short film keep its focus tight and on-point, it has the opposite effect on a documentary. In a short doc, it is enough for the viewer to be presented with a detailed, engaging slice of life, with no point required save the sharing of lived …
By turns exhilarating and devastating, the 2013 live-action short-film lineup serves as a reminder of why movies matter, what they can do, and why they needn't be larded up into three-hour epics that hit all the expected beats. Every entry confronts the blunt fact of death; every entry provides a …
Pixar's longtime domination of the animation world takes its toll, as generational rifts and/or personal neuroses are what gets treated here — including Pixar's own, more-than-a-little creepy entry, Bao. Woman bites into dumpling, discovers it's sentient, raises it as her child, and then things get strange. They're still going for …
This year's live-action slate is reviewed here.
When the Soviet Union won the gold medal in men's basketball at the 1988 Olympics, four of the five starters hailed from the same city. That city was not in Russia, but Lithuania, a country that had been under Soviet control since World War II. Lithuania had been a basketball …
Or: Pennywise stops being pound foolish. Or at least lead-singer Jim Lindberg does, as he takes a long, hard look at the tension that arises between being a punk-rock icon and the father of three little girls. Other punk dads join the discussion, and the result is an intermittently fascinating …