Aims to do for the Timberlake-Bieber popstar crowd what the mockumentary-rockumentary This is Spinal Tap did for heavy metal rockers. Like Spinal Tap, the humor is front-loaded: star Andy Samberg & Co. are at their best when they’re deadpanning as addlepated celebrity man-children whose vision of the good life involves …
Director François Ozon’s love letter to the post-menopausal woman: wise, matriarchal, and unencumbered by desire. What opens as a seemingly breezy domestic farce set in late-’70s France quickly ventures into the-personal-is-political territory as an aging trophy wife is forced to reckon with her seeming superfluity. But just because the story …
Director and co-writer Shane Black stirs together Guardians of the Galaxy (what if our supergroup was a bunch of damaged misfits?) Split (what if so-called mental disorders are actually the next evolutionary leap forward?), and Terminator 2 (what if the baddie from the initial installment was now the good guy, …
It's a fun premise: take a practitioner of a universally loathed profession — New York City bike messengers, a group that treats traffic laws and those who follow them as little more than video game obstacles — and make him a hero, a guy whose Special Delivery can literally deliver …
A five-genre pileup: buddy-cop flick, supernatural thriller, Western, dystopian-future sci-fi, and straight-up monster horror. Sorting through the wreckage is more trouble than it’s worth. The Western stuff works better than the rest (despite the multiple Clint Eastwood impersonations); the tension within the thrown-together partnership of lawman and warrior-priest provides the …
Grueling, downbeat, and ultimately indulgent thriller starring Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal, the former a self-reliant Christian father who decides to take an investigation into his daughter's disappearance into his own (bloody, torturous) hands, the latter a twitchy Masonic cop who's handling the case. The story is heavy on symbolism …
In 2017, director Matthew Heineman tried to make the world pay attention to the horrors of Syria’s civil war via City of Ghosts, a documentary about the citizen journalist group Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, some of whose members lived amid the slaughter — because it was their home. Here, …
Suffering Sappho, it's a real-life superhero origin story! In her wildly successful star-turn on the big screen this summer, Wonder Woman was presented as Zeus' parting gift to humanity, a secret weapon in its struggle against the dark promptings of Ares, God of War. But her actual creator was psychologist …
Whoa. The latest documentary from Man on Wire director James Marsh, Project Nim tells the story of Columbia University psychology professor Herbert Terrace’s attempt to have a chimpanzee raised like a human and taught language in the process — and of Nim’s Odyssean life after the experiment shuts down. The …
Somebody took a perfectly good black comedy and grafted a fairy tale onto it. The results aren’t pretty. What could have been a delicious dissection of one poor bastard’s attempt to become cool by whoring out his upscale home for party-fueled destruction winds up as an affirmation of true love …
John Boorman's masterful followup to his 1987 semi-autobiographical Hope and Glory. Then, the story was about a boy growing up in the London Blitz. Now it's 1952, and young Bill Rohan is a conscript in the Army, teaching typing on a domestic base. For the first 20 minutes or so, …
Can women and women be friends? If you're gonna go hard to the closeup, you're gonna want to work with a face like Elisabeth Moss's. Alex Ross Perry's (Listen Up Philip) portrait of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown opens on a teary-smeary Moss mid-breakup, veering between …
It’s a movie about a poor girl (Madina Nalwanga) being raised in a ramshackle African village by a single mother (Lupita Nyong’o) who comes under the tutelage of a chess coach (David Oyelowo) who would rather be an engineer, and who quickly discovers she has a gift for the game. …
For a film featuring brutal dictators, the whitewashing of history, murder plots, revolutionary plots, labor camps, broken families, artistic bankruptcy, and rape, writer-director Fernando Trueba’s movie about movie-making is strangely frothy and upbeat. Is the point here that showbiz people can’t really afford personal principles, such that their acts of …