Director J.J. Abrams at his most J.J. Abrams-y. A lens flare light show. A Spielberg homage (the opening is taken straight from Raiders of the Lost Ark). Deft nostalgia-mining coupled with equally deft placement of the extracted gems in the crown of his new creation (a Tribble plays a key …
The kind view — the uncynical view, the generous view — is that director J.J. Abrams just wants to give the joy of childhood back to a generation that fell in love with Star Wars back in 1977. (Plus maybe win a new generation over to that story’s mythological power.) …
Many things move quickly in writer-director Rian Johnson’s entry into the famous story from a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away: ships zipping through hyperspace, wild horselike critters rampaging through a casino, the droid BB-8 rolling to seemingly anywhere he wants to go. But the film itself …
Well, that’s over. After Rian Johnson’s Episode VIII: The Riling of the Fanbase, Disney lets J.J. Abrams resume the Star Wars cockpit, and the man who gave new meaning to fan service with The Force Awakens wastes no time before initiating course correction. When we meet up with brash pilot …
With its focus on a renowned European restaurant and its structure built around the four seasons, Entre les Bras (punnily rendered as Step Up to the Plate for us English-speakers) will naturally call to mind 2011’s superfoodie documentary El Bulli: Cooking in Progress. But the films have inverse emphases: El …
Having treated the man who put life online — Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg — screenwriter Aaron Sorkin now turns his attention to the man who put it into the machine. (Not for nothing is the Apple co-founder so desperate to have the Mac say "Hello" at its unveiling.) Once again, …
When Apple co-founder/mastermind/personification Steve Jobs died in 2011, documentarian Alex Gibney (The Armstrong Lie) found himself marveling at the massive outpouring of public grief and love. Why, he wondered, were we so upset that a rich, ungenerous businessman had left us? As the resulting documentary makes clear, he wasn't a …
Gorgeously shot story of Craig Morrison (a masterful James Cromwell), a New Brunswick old-timer who sets out to build a one-story house on his property for his wife Irene (Genevieve Bujold). She is beginning to suffer from dementia, and their two-story farmhouse is becoming too much for her. He knows …
Writer-director Robert Budreau presents an account of the events that gave name to the famed, seemingly bizarre Syndrome in which a captive bonds with a captor. If there is a surreal, even unreal quality to the proceedings, well, that’s no accident. First, what starts out looking like a bank robbery …
An imperfect, but not entirely unsuccessful, attempt at a grown-up movie for children from director Shawn Seet. It teaches the little tykes about parallel stories: a present-day drama over whether to open a chunk of Australia for mining set against a back-when drama over whether to open a chunk of …
Something about the ratio between money and problems? Five young African-Americans (played by O'Shea Jackson, Jr., Corey Hawkins, Jason Mitchell, Neil Brown, Jr., and Aldis Hodge) find their way out of variously difficult situations in mid-'80s Los Angeles — police brutality, gang violence, financial hardship, social and racial roadblocks, thwarted …
Nicole Kidman and Joseph Fiennes play the recently transplanted parents of two in small-town Australia. Their son is given to walking around town late at night; their daughter, to more horizontal activities. (See also: the reason for the recent move.) When the kids disappear, the family's business becomes everybody's business …
Ester Gould and Reijer Zwaan’s tender documentary about the male dancers on Madonna’s 1990 Blonde Ambition tour follows them up onto the stage (where Madonna’s motivational mantra was “Give me more of you”), behind the scenes for the behind-the-scenes documentary Truth or Dare (where she famously dared one dancer to …
Read the book. Early on in Matt Tyrnauer’s documentary about the famous/infamous New York City discotheque, co-founder (and chief talking head) Ian Schrager is shown the galleys for a mammoth, photo-rich book about the place he just calls “Studio.” And the best things about the film are the black and …
Writer-director Coralie Fargeat’s long and lurid cautionary tale — anything so laden with body horror must surely be cautionary, right? — very much wants to have its cheesecake and eat it, too. Which is to say, the film treats the Awful Truth that camera-based showbiz (both the people who make …