Grown-ups may wince, but Paul Dalio’s earnest, ambitious manic-poet romance Touched With Fire is a gift to the young and passionately creative, to the brains-a-poppin’ kids caught up in invention and each other and the invention of each other. You don’t have to be bipolar to get caught up yourself…

A laugh comes at last just before the end credits of Robert Eggers’ lit-class horror-bummer The Witch: a boastful note attesting to the documentary truthfulness of the dialogue in the movie we’ve just seen. Over 90 minutes that prove shriekiness is no impediment to ponderousness, we’ve beheld the harrowing of…

A legitimate stunner in that word’s truest sense, Colombian director Ciro Guerra’s river-trip Embrace of the Serpent mesmerizes and jacks with you, leaving you not quite certain, at its end, how to go about the rest of your day. The film is beautiful and ferocious, calm and torrential, a plunge…

A guy I grew up with had the superpower to make anything dirty. No matter what you’d say to him, he’d manage to make it about his dick, or about anal sex, or about how girls — so he had heard — smelled like fish. I asked him what he…

You’re probably right if you think you might get a couple laughs out of a movie titled Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. You’re also right if you’ve guessed that this gung-ho but cruddy-looking mashup fails from A to Z: It’s neither good Austen nor good zombie flick. But in those…

There’s essentially one joke in the Kung-Fu Panda movies. A ridiculous, adorable creature executes some extravagant action-flick flourish — vaulting over roofs, dropping a bad guy, striking a poster-perfect superhero pose. Then the battle music fades and that adorable creature breaks badass character to remind us it’s totally relatable, even…

Here’s an odd thing to say of a lavishly expensive 3D IMAX maritime disaster flick that hits theaters just a month after the last one: They don’t make them like this anymore. There’s a reason for that, of course — the parents and grandparents who like ’em stolid and corny…

“Who can give me the derivative of X?” a high-school teacher asks early in the YA-apocalypse mashup The 5th Wave. As soon as she asks that, the lights blink off, everybody’s cellphones die and jets tumble from the sky. We never hear a student respond, but here’s my Official Fan…

The movie they’re selling isn’t the movie this is. Sony Pictures Classics is peddling Nicholas Hytner’s film of Alan Bennett’s play and memoir The Lady in the Van like it’s the usual twinkly Best Exotic time-with-our-elders holiday entertainment. There’s Maggie Smith, dressed up as what my grandmother used to call…

But what about the meaninglessness of everything? William Monahan’s Mojave is one of those ’90s-style chatty-killer movies, mixed with one of those ’90s-style guns-in-the-desert existential cheapies, the kind of picture where good-looking dudes shooting each other is passed off as elemental and beautiful rather than just what it actually is…

A sure-bet time-waster with a clutch of big laughs? A 100-minute brief on Hollywood’s lack of imagination? Grist for future essays about how quickly the idea of Ice “Fuck tha Police” Cube playing a gun-happy hero cop became routine? Whatever you make of Ride Along 2 beforehand is certain to…

What’s been missing for years in Hollywood’s adventure films? Verisimilitude. Correspondent with the rise of the computers, and the ability to show us any place that filmmakers can imagine, has been the fall of immersiveness — that sense that the actors are in a place you can’t go yourself rather…

Here’s a challenge. Gather some friends, pour some drinks, and announce to everyone the premise of Daddy’s Home, the new family comedy about dads competing to be pater superior. It won’t take long: Will Ferrell is a doting schlemiel of a stepdad to suburban moppets whose biological father, played by…

Here’s to Quentin Tarantino’s cussed perversity. The Hateful Eight, his intimate, suspenseful western splatter-horror comedy, has been shot at great expense in the long-gone 70 mm format, but the movie itself is set almost entirely in cramped interiors. He’s hired Ennio Morricone to score the thing, but don’t expect rousing…

A while back, a friend expressed concern that her son, a 10-year-old, was watching too much My Little Pony. “It’s sweet,” she said, “but not what I’d choose.” I asked what she would prefer that he watch. “Well, his dad started him on that new Star Wars cartoon.” That cartoon…

Life is hard for the extravagantly wealthy lounging about in one of the world’s most beautiful hotels. Paolo Sorrentino’s latest might seem easy to mock — here, after all, are Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel, playing a composer and a film director, moping in a Swiss spa about old age…

Justin Kurzel’s is a Macbeth stripped of lit-class ponderousness, stage-bound declaiming, Ren Fest cosplay, and prestige-film pomposity. It is the essence of this cruelest of plays, the blade unsheathed — and, as a blade would be after hacking through all these Scottish wars, its edge is blunt, rough, a thing…

They could have called it Hitchcock/Truffaut/Scorsese/Fincher. Less an adaptation of one of the great books about film than a feature-length recommendation, Kent Jones’ documentary take on François Truffaut’s exhaustive career-survey 1966 interview with Alfred Hitchcock is an arresting précis, sharply edited and generous with its film clips — it’s a…

There’s terrific comic potential in the idea at the heart of Don Verdean, the latest shrug of a film from Jared and Jerusha Hess, the husband-wife writer-director team behind Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre, and one that for good reason you haven’t seen, Gentlemen Broncos. That idea: A fraud of a…

Like grad school or that cave in The Empire Strikes Back, what you get out of Rick Alverson’s bold and desolate Entertainment depends on what you put into it. It’s less a film you watch than a breakdown episode you try to get through, a bottomed-out desert lulu that manages…

Yes, Janis Joplin made a hell of a record out of Rodgers & Hart’s “Little Girl Blue,” but you’re right if you winced to learn that Amy Berg’s new documentary feature about Joplin takes that song as its title — and as its dismal argument and organizing principle. “I want…

Maybe Cars and the Hot Wheels-ification of Pixar has been a good thing. Now that the storied studio has, like its rivals, puked onto our screens indifferent kid-distracting junk, its new movies come un-freighted from expectations of genius. Miserable as it was, Planes: Fire and Rescue (from corporate parent Disney…