Maudie is hit-or-miss, but you’ll probably bawl anyway. Its creators have elected to dramatize nothing but the things that traditional narrative features usually botch. The film, directed by Aisling Walsh, surveys the life of a beloved artist, Nova Scotia’s self-taught folk painter Maud Lewis, who produced scores of cheerily primitive…

Most hero stories dating back to Achilles are fantasies of power, of the world made right through violence. What sets Spider-Man apart, outside his joyous bouncing through New York City, is that his stories are also fantasies of responsibility. Rather than just kick bad-guy ass, Spider-Man must forever fight to…

At least Rough Night, Lucia Aniello’s dutifully raucous new bachelorette-party comedy, achieves verisimilitude. It’s a rough watch and an evening killer, this film about friends who seem not to love, like or even really know one another. If you enjoy strained fun with people who have grown apart from you,…

It’s only after three encounters, a night on molly, a blow-up argument, an impassioned recitation of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “First Fig,” and some tender May-December — late December — sex that Sam Elliott’s The Hero character can be bothered to ask what Laura Prepon’s does for a living. Turns…

Here’s something I never guessed I would say: It might be worth going into the new Cars movie spoiler-free. Without giving anything away, I can tell you that, at its climax, this latest installment in a springtime of sequels the world doesn’t need eases into a surprising new gear and…

“I can’t ensure I will not be disappeared in the future,” Joshua Wong says, deep into Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower, Joe Piscatella’s rousing, terrifying thriller of a documentary. He says it a little distractedly, as though his own life is an afterthought when considered against the scope of his movement…

Yes, dead men tell no tales — but neither, really, do the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Rather than stories, the series, of which this 2017 entry is the fifth, offers an unpalatable mix of mincing slapstick, rote derring-do, ponderous CGI, whiskery sea-chanty mysticism, and dutiful action sequences whose only…

Yes, there’s spoilers below for this unspoilable show. “Don’t let yourself be hurt this time,” sings Julee Cruise on “Falling,” the plushly minimalist 1989 synth ballad that, a year later, stripped of its vocal and lyrics, would become the opening theme for Twin Peaks. David Lynch himself wrote that lyric,…

Chris Gethard, the comedian and talk-show host, has the look of his own comic-strip avatar. Those black glasses, that elfin, upright forelock, the eyebrows that dance in alarm and amazement: Onstage, in his one-man show, Career Suicide, Gethard could be Charles Schulz’s sketch of Chris Gethard, a work of cartoon…

A sleepy earnestness both ennobles and afflicts Ricardo de Montreuil’s fathers-and-sons story, Lowriders. At first the film plays as a low-key corrective, a Hollywood drama with name producers (Brian Grazer, Jason Blum) that, outside a couple of tutorial info-dumps covering cultural basics, presents East Los Angeles lives like pretty much…

A committed (and controversial) performance from Elle Fanning as a high school kid born Ramona — but identifying as Ray — is diced up and short-shrifted in this muddled comedy-drama. The title suggests the chief trouble: Director and co-writer Gaby Dellal’s attention is divided among three generations, with Ray’s mother…

America is going to hate this movie. Doug Liman’s The Wall — whose title will forever demand that, when bringing up the film in conversation, you’ll have to say, “No, the other Wall” — is a mean little thriller set in our desert wars, and its only American soldiers are…

It’s easy to giggle at The Circle, the movie, just as it’s easy giggle sometimes at Dave Eggers, whose novel is the film’s source. James Ponsoldt’s adaptation (co-written with Eggers) is, like Eggers’ books, nakedly earnest, engaged with nothing less but The State of Things Now, more smart than its…

Twice I’ve described Kitty Green’s curious, alienating docu-whatzit Casting JonBenet to friends, and twice I’ve been asked, with surprising heat, “Why?” and “What’s the point?” So, this time, before we get into the specifics of what this documentary actually documents, let’s take a moment to consider what the film isn’t…

Terry George’s The Promise has the rare good fortune of turning up in theaters just weeks after another film showed how necessary a movie like this is. The second star-driven war-adventure film of 2017 to set a cross-cultural love triangle against the horror of the Armenian Genocide, The Promise would…

First things first. The new Mystery Science Theater 3000, that basic-cable and UHF puppet show that was above all else a treatise about what it was like to grow up on basic cable and UHF, is a cheery, companionable continuation, an almost business-as-usual new season Kickstarted and Netflixed that Febreezes…