Nearly every Alien movie begins the same way: in the vast loneliness of space, in a ship that’s running on its own. In the first film, Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), the camera slowly glides through the dark, lifeless corridors of the commercial towing vehicle Nostromo before locating the sleeping bodies…
Don’t hold it against Tom Tykwer’s A Hologram for the King that its best scene is also its first. As Alan Clay (Tom Hanks) strides down a suburban street singing a modified version of Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” (“You may find yourself … without a beautiful house ……
Careful what you wish for. When it was announced that Jessica Chastain and Emily Blunt would be joining Charlize Theron and Chris Hemsworth for the followup to 2012’s humdrum action/fairy tale Snow White and the Huntsman, many filmgoers, myself included, got unduly excited. The original film, while a hit, had…
Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room is an impeccably crafted cinematic torture machine — in the best possible way. The premise will make some cringe, while making others giddy: A punk band, trapped in a club in the middle of nowhere, have to fight off a bunch of murderous skinheads to get…
Here’s about as convincing an argument as I can imagine for the existence of the modern Hollywood blockbuster. Disney and Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book reinvigorates an oft-told tale with star power, technology and calculated charm. It’s been billed as a live-action remake (it’s too good to be called a…
New Zealand’s Cliff Curtis has been stealing scenes for years now, so it’s nice to see him playing a bona-fide lead in the new chess drama The Dark Horse. Based on the life of Genesis Potini, a bipolar Maori chess champion, the film follows a coach and a group of…
A fractured film about a fractured family, Louder Than Bombs takes a potentially tired premise and reshapes it before our eyes. It opens on a newborn’s tiny hand helplessly clinging to a father’s finger, and ends with a different father watching his two sons sleep. In between is a story…
Jean-Marc Vallée’s Demolition presents an interesting experiment: What if you told a story of tragedy but withheld all the tenderness and emotion from it, so that you were left — at least until the very end — with just literal and figurative wreckage, disconnected fragments seeking to be put back…
The main attraction in the engaging, largely predictable chess drama The Dark Horse is the gripping lead performance by Cliff Curtis, a part-Maori actor from New Zealand who has spent more than two decades doing notable character parts in big films. You’ll likely recognize his face: His look suggests, at…
Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! is being billed as a “spiritual sequel” to his 1993 high-school stoner classic Dazed and Confused, but in some key ways it feels closer to his animated 2001 philosophy bull session Waking Life — a freewheeling grab bag of ideas, ruminations, and loose ends held…
Thunderous, ponderous and occasionally exciting, Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice opens with one of those grim proclamations that the creators of modern superhero movies are so fond of: “There was a time above, a time before,” intones the voice of Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck), over a by-now…
The joke was on me when I first saw My Big Fat Greek Wedding back in 2002: I watched the film at a press screening that also happened to be attended by a large group of older female tourists. While I grimaced through the movie’s obvious gags and not-ready-for-prime-time direction,…
Take heart, Newsroom fans. If you were hankering for more scenes of Jeff Daniels standing around talking, you’ll find an unlikely ally in the new young-adult sci-fi sequel Allegiant, the third entry in the Divergent series based on Veronica Roth’s hit novels. Too bad the stuff he’s saying is so…
In Jeff Nichols’ gripping domestic thriller Take Shelter, Michael Shannon played a family man convinced that Armageddon was upon us. But even as the character’s visions compelled him to take more and more extreme precautions, the film remained fixed in the world of the real. It was a portrait of…
The Brothers Grimsby is a movie for those who thought Kingsman: The Secret Service didn’t go far enough. If all the exploding heads and anal-sex jokes and creative impalements of Matthew Vaughn’s tongue-in-cheek spy thriller didn’t do it for you, rest assured: This time, we get to see British super-agent…
“Why did you let me film this?” filmmaker Josh Kriegman incredulously asks Anthony Weiner late in Weiner, a documentary about the former New York congressman’s failed 2013 mayoral run. The disgraced candidate doesn’t have a good answer, but the question hangs over this fascinating film, which plays like it started…
Julie Delpy’s Lolo is a maternal horror film in the guise of a light romantic comedy, and therein lies much of its charm. Delpy plays Violette, a fortysomething single mother who has long soured on dating when, during a getaway in Biarritz, she meets Jean-René (Dany Boon), a loyal, bumbling…
What if Terrence Malick directed an episode of Entourage? Well, we’re about to find out, sort of. In Knight of Cups, the director of Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line and The Tree of Life turns his roaming camera and ruminating voiceovers toward Los Angeles and the movie business,…
