“How could a big man like you fuck up like this?” That’s the question that Nathan Zuckerman fears being asked — in Philip Roth’s Pulitzer-winning American Pastoral (1997) — if he were to show the book he’s written about the tragic life of his old Newark classmate Seymour “Swede” Levov…
Like the rambling fixer-upper at its heart, Merchant Ivory’s Howards End has aged quite well, and not just because of the brightened-up 4K restoration from Cohen Media Group. It’s brisk and funny, prim but open-minded, testy about pomposity even as it exemplifies what once was the most pompous of all…
There’s plenty of time to wonder, as J.K. Simmons narrates page after page of backstory, whether the creators of The Accountant realized that their dutifully twisty R-rated thriller was actually another superhero story. Yes, it’s got trappings of psychology and adult thoughtfulness, speeches about the mysteries of the brain and…
Here’s what matters most: You will laugh. Kevin Hart on a stage before thousands, yapping for more than an hour? I don’t care what kind of miserable killjoy you are, you’re going to laugh. There are two reasons you might be offended — you may find the material either too…
You might have let yourself act surprised as the waters have risen and the floods have come. But you can’t anymore, not after 13th, Ava DuVernay’s miraculous cine-history of the criminalization of American blackness. Few films shake and astonish like this one, even though nothing in it should be a…
Outside of dudes killing dudes, there’s little the moviegoers seem to love more than weddings, a truth that Elite Zexer’s heartsick desert drama Sand Storm exploits for a first-act sucker punch. The nuptials that teen Layla (Lamis Ammar) is driving her father Suliman (Hitham Omari) toward, the frame of a…
Here’s a great example of how not to open your documentary. “After releasing my film in 2012 about marriage equality, I was at a loss of what topic to explore next,” says Cassie Jaye in the halting tones of a hostage reading her captors’ statement to the world. That comes…
Forgiveness is tricky and personal, and you can’t be blamed for not offering it. Buying a ticket to Nate Parker’s slave-revolt drama The Birth of a Nation demands at least some measure of it. As you’ve probably heard, while a student at Penn State, Parker — the film’s star, director,…
The first moments of Luke Cage offer much that the previous 38 or so hours of Marvel superhero Netflix drama haven’t: laughter. Warmth. A sense that the New York City that Daredevil and Jessica Jones mope and brawl through might be more than just a place to save — it…
Adults in 2016 know not to feed the trolls. If you have to, though, you need to come on hard and strong, publicly glutting them on so much truth that they just curl up and die under their bridges/in their comment threads. So it goes in Mick Jackson’s patient, heartening,…
In this age of billion-dollar, candy-colored, fully digital child-distraction movie-making, the new chatty-animal adventure comedy Storks wouldn’t have to be good in any way to be wildly profitable. It often is good, though, hilariously so, its too-familiar misfits-become-a-family storyline enlivened by flights of lavish comic invention. Its set pieces, especially…
Set aside all human decency and imagine, for a moment, that you’re Kim Jong-il. Imagine it’s 1978, and you’re pushing 40, still Great Leader’s son rather than the future Dear Leader. You have yearned for years to create a truly great North Korean cinema, one whose films would be celebrated…
Look, if you’re not stirred by the sight of Denzel Washington, clad in head-to-toe black, riding a black stallion over dunes and bluffs and right up to the saloon of some two-bit frontier town — well, then maybe the movies just aren’t for you. Washington, of course, strides right into…
To show all that he can do, to show something of what life’s actually like, Donald Glover first has to break your heart. Glover – the star, creator, and often writer of FX’s tense, downwardly mobile hangout comedy Atlanta – is best known, still, as a handsome clown on NBC’s Community, Dan…
Still and silent, Jerry Lewis slumps there like old furniture in the lifeless house in which the first half of Daniel Noah’s coming-of-old-age drama Max Rose molders. The film is a fiction, a tidy and improbable one, but these scenes have documentary power. Lewis’ Max Rose, recently bereaved, sits and…
Matt Johnson’s prankish Operation Avalanche boasts a strong half hour of footage that’s fully engaged with this question: Could a couple of bright, Kubrick-obsessed A.V. geeks have faked the moon landing in 1969? Like the best speculative fiction, these scenes concern the practicalities. We see the gang’s hidden-camera peek at…
The most destructive villain in this year’s summer movies isn’t some super-powered fiend. It’s us, the consumers of North America, whose desires shape the world. The U.S. looms over Jayro Bustamante’s patient, observant, exquisitely painful debut feature Ixcanul, just as it looms over the Guatemalan coffee plantation in which Bustamante’s…
Here’s a gorgeous and audacious slice of East Bay life that’s dreamily attentive to Northern California sun and concrete, to the shambled beauty of a street couch under a BART station, to the slow thump of cruising stoned with hip-hop bumping, to the way suburb-city edges into city-city and the…
Christian Carion’s refugees-on-the-march World War II drama Come What May is the kind of old-fashioned war movie that’s crafted not just to emphasize history’s horror and brutality. Yes, Carion stages the occasional slaughter with heartsick brio, and sometimes can’t resist taking pleasure when the violence goes against the bad guys,…
Critics often dismiss blockbuster entertainments with the vague, half-assed complaint that they resemble “video games.” Movies like Fede Alvarez’s Don’t Breathe reveal games’ actual influence — for the better. The breakthrough with studio horror films in recent years, since the found-footage boom, is a welcome environmental immersiveness. It’s a testament…
Natalie Portman proves herself a filmmaker of intelligence, ambition, and inventiveness in her debut as a director and writer — just not one who is always certain as a storyteller. A Tale of Love and Darkness adapts, with a passionate somberness, several threads from Amos Oz’s autobiographical novel of the…
Do we call Anthropoid a thriller? Sean Ellis’ earnest, day-ruining WWII bullet-a-thon is rooted in fact but comes on like pulp fiction in its first reels, hitting secret-mission story beats old enough to have served in the big war. As freedom fighters Josef (Jamie Dornan) and Jan (Cillian Murphy) skulk…
