Meet the Other and Run There’s no escaping No Escape’s suspense — or its xenophobia. This mean and vigorous men’s adventure pulp throwback has everything going against it. It’s a late-August release whose leads, Owen Wilson and Lake Bell, tend to be the best things in movies you otherwise regret…
Promising and disappointing all at once, Jon Watts’ backroads thriller Cop Car heralds the arrival of a significant director, one adept not just at the usual action and suspense but also at the fleet, affecting depiction of lives as they’re actually lived. In the opening scenes, the camera glides alongside…
“This conversation is the best one I ever had,” David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) tells us as The End of the Tour wraps up, and the movie, a pleasantly talky chamber piece, gives us welcome bursts of it. That long chat, with a David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel) abashed by the…
It’s heartbreaking that, in his last dramatic film, Robin Williams plays depressed and repressed, burdened by secrets, a man incapable of connecting. Williams invests himself in the role of a closeted Nashville bank manager married to a woman for whom he feels only sexless affection. Clearly, the actor was moved…
We may not need another hero, but true believers don’t need to shrink-ray their expectations. Ant-Man is the first Marvel film — and the first of this summer’s pixels-go-kablooey time-wasters — to get better as it goes. The filmmakers save their biggest, wiggiest ideas for the climaxes, where they wittily…
A romance about wanting to see a romance, a comic tragedy about an onlooker willing something tragic, Anne Fontaine’s Flaubert-inspired meta-pleasure Gemma Bovery takes as its subject the act of watching the lives around us — and of wishing those lives were literature. Or films: Here’s a French film thick…
Part of what makes writer-director Rick Famuyiwa’s Dope so fresh and joyous is that in many key ways it’s not new at all. Here’s a dramatic teen comedy, flavor-crystaled with sex and drugs and innocent raunch, about good friends who get caught up in bad business on their way to…
Of course a 2015 Joe Dante horror-comedy would be some kind of throwback. The Gremlins director has spent a career idealizing the creature-feature jollies of his youth, jolting audiences with wittily vicious nostalgia. Dante’s goofy monster movies have always been more toothy than their antecedents — more technically accomplished, fully…
Twenty years back, at the height of the UFO boom, the truest believers in alien abduction scenarios would argue that their most compelling evidence was the commonalities between regular people’s stories of nighttime visitations. Even under hypnosis, “abductees” testified to remarkably consistent waking-dream terrors: an alert immobility, shadowed and mostly…
The Crimes Remain the Same The Connection’s glorious technique can’t disguise its familiarity. A movie about bringing down druglords that’s actually mostly about movies, Cédric Jimenez’s The Connection is stretched over driven-cop beats so familiar American audiences could probably follow it without subtitles. (It’s in French — add that to…
Good or bad, Cameron Crowe movies build to improbable declarations of sincerity, to the great acts or speeches a man must loose from himself into a world too cynical to value them. His heroes always must filibuster regular life with their decency. Superficially, these acts and speeches are performed in…
Poltergeist 2015 is to Poltergeist ’82 what today’s shipped-frozen-to-the-store Pizza Hut dough is to the kneaded-on-site pies the chain’s stoned cooks tossed in the Reagan era. It’s the same kind of thing, with the same shape and some shared ingredients, but the texture’s gone limp, and there’s no sense of…
Maybe we contain multitudes, and maybe we contain a couple great splashes of primary color. With one arm stretched high above his head, puppeteer Caroll Spinney has spent the past decades…
This doesn’t feel like a film that exists. How is George Miller’s bonkers, exhausting, no-future smash-’em-up Mad Max: Fury Road not one of those almost-was boondoggles mourned and dreamed of by fans, a revered director’s…
One of the most inspired ideas in late-middle Woody Allen pictures comes in Deconstructing Harry, a movie about how Allen loves Bergman, hates Philip Roth, and isn’t quite clear on what “deconstruction” means. Allen stages passages from fiction written by the protagonist, a novelist named Harry. One features Robin Williams…
One of Kristen Wiig’s finest moments as a movie star is a throwaway bit of shamed silent morning-after comedy: Her Bridesmaids character is skulking out of the home of a cad played by Jon Hamm. She’s playing it cool, swallowing back the humiliation of her bad choices, trying to show…
Did you know that there’s a new family-audience feature film that implies God nuked Japan because one plucky American moppet dared to dream? That’s no exaggeration. In the summer of 1945, the kid stands on a California dock, points his fingers magician-style out at the Pacific horizon, and screams a…
Is it possible to be accidentally definitive? James D. Cooper’s thorough and revealing doc Lambert & Stamp is billed as the story of the managers who whipped the Who into being the Who. But once it’s sketched out, the characters and ambitions of Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert, putative New…
The trolling is coming from inside the house! Mere emojis can’t capture the plugged-in joys of the first hour or so of haunted-Internet teen flick Unfriended, which knives with dexterous wit The Way We Live Now. Here’s a clutch of horny high school dopes hanging out on Skype, getting doxed…
Truth in film takes another jolly beating in Disneynature’s Monkey Kingdom, a documentary-like nature flick with the last-century chutzpah to pass off its marvelous footage of some months in the life of a single-mom macaque as a full-fledged princess story, with three acts, a tearful exile, and her ascent, in…
There’s not quite as much desert and dancing as you might expect in Desert Dancer, an earnest and occasionally hokey drama about kids wanting to hoof it in a world that forbids all hoofin’. Since it’s a based-on-a-true-story job, and since the killjoys this time are the Iranian government, much…
“The public really doesn’t listen when they’re being told straightforward facts,” says the Amazing Randi. The magician, escape artist, and tiny lion of principled skepticism, now north of 80, leans forward in a black chair, all knees and elbows and Old Testament beard. If it weren’t for that sharpie’s suit…
