Movie Reviews
There are a great many talking heads in Nanfu Wang and Lynn Zhang’s One Child Nation, a documentary devoted to exploring how exactly China went about preventing 338 million births between 1979 and 2015, when …
“There are millions of Jewish guys you could have chosen,” barista Ronit (Rebecca Esmeralda Telhami) admonishes her Israeli employer Sarah (Sivan Kerchner), “Are you that desperate? With an Arab?” Sarah’s difficulty in answering the question …
Remember 60 Minutes, America’s first TV news magazine? Remember its tenacious terrier of a host, Mike Wallace, he of the insistent, accusatory question? Yes? No? C’mon, the guy interviewed Putin just a few years ago. …
There’s no mention of Robert Altman’s breathtakingly grimy McCabe and Mrs. Miller in Nick Broomfield’s (Lily Tomlin, Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam, Whitney: Can I Be Me) latest celebrity biodoc, Marianne and Leonard: Words of Love. …
Remember when you were a kid and your parents told you they were going to take you to a movie and you responded by asking, your voice leaping with a combination of hope and trepidation, …
Say this for Walking on Water, Andrey Paounov’s documentary on the installation artist Christo’s 2016 effort to mount an enormous orange floating pier on the surface of northern Italy’s Lake Iseo: there are no talking …
Oura Culpa! Mr. Lickona took a vacation and this reporter missed the screening of the much-anticipated Midsommar. Once I ran to advance screenings; now I run from them. Why? Because I would much rather try …
Mexican anthropologist Santiago Genovés found the inspiration behind his notorious “Peace Project” the day his flight home from a conference on the history of violent behavior was interrupted by a hijacking. Art imitates life, and …
When the Lord said, “Judge not, that ye be not judged,” He wasn’t referring to American Woman’s Deb Callahan (Sienna Miller). Deb can’t remove the butt from between her lips long enough to cuddle with …
It didn’t have to end this way — in such thoroughly standard smash ‘em up fashion, with minor heroes dutifully duking it out with faceless hordes for punchy-power bolt minute after punchy-power-bolt minute until the …
What’s the old saw about war? That it’s long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror? Tweaked a little, the line serves pretty well as a description of writer-director Camille Vidal-Naquet’s Sauvage, the …
The three o’clock bell sounded the close of business day for most grade-schoolers. Not Scooter. While others were off in a field hitting balls with sticks or in the alley playing pinners, from ages nine …
Several anti-death penalty features were fated to follow in the wake of Dead Man Standing (most notably The Green Mile), but in most instances, stories of wrongfully-accused lifers punching the clock on death row are …
Director Dome Karukoski’s portrait of the man who wrote The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings tells three intertwining tales. The first and most artful of these gives us the making of a writer: …
For his third outing as a director, Ralph Fiennes gives the title, star billing, and great majority of screen time to Oleg Ivenko in his turn as famed Russian ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev, who also …
What’s more shocking than a senior level VP at a New Jersey hedge fund finding herself smack dab in the middle of a weeklong celebration of the distinctively raunchy hip hop duo Insane Clown Posse? …