Depending on whom you talk to, we live in an era of conformity or one of anything-goes individuality; in a golden age of television or the brightest of movie galaxies. But just about everyone will agree that we’re ruled by screens of all sizes, which means it’s harder than ever…
Sofía Vergara is built like an amphora, a living testament to the form ceramicists throughout the centuries have adored. In the fleet and gloriously ridiculous comedy Hot Pursuit, Vergara plays Daniella Riva, a mobster’s wife who needs to be escorted from San Antonio to Dallas, where she’ll testify against the…
Though it’s hard to believe in 2015, there was a time when fictional heroines didn’t have to be role models, when a character’s backbone could be more than just a row of vertebrae lined up into teachable moments. It’s wonderful that modern readers love Jane Austen — we still warm…
No one likes the idea of growing older, and anyone who claims as much is lying, either to you or to herself. The anxiety of aging actors is particularly acute, not necessarily because they feel the passage of time intensely, but because, having the privilege of watching their faces change…
It’s nearly impossible to convince the average American citizen, especially if he’s a straight man, that haute couture has a reason to exist. The phrase isn’t just a catch-all for “really expensive clothes,” as it’s commonly misunderstood, but a specific term for clothes made entirely by hand, for a specific…
The sequence that opens True Story tells you plenty about what you’re in for: A rumpled teddy bear drifts down from our vantage point like a puffy brown snowflake, landing with slow-motion deliberateness on the form of a PJ-clad toddler curled up in a suitcase, seemingly asleep. She’s like an…
Even if you think you don’t know the photographs of Sebastião Salgado, you’ve probably seen them. In one of his most famous pictures, taken in the mid-1980s in Mali, a woman whose face is half-hidden by a dark, rough-textured cotton veil, her bearing as elegant as anything you’d see in…
When you’re young, to be old — even just the 44 kind of old — is unimaginable. Yet no one who has ever turned 44, or 54 or 74, can tell you how it happened. There’s no single moment of passing to the other side of the looking glass; the…
In 1848, Euphemia Gray, a bright and pretty young girl from a family of modest means, left her home in Scotland to marry her era’s equivalent of an art-world rock star, the imposingly erudite critic John Ruskin. Perhaps as early as her wedding night, Effie knew she’d made a mistake:…
You may, like me, have seen all the Fast and Furious movies, and you may, like me, have enjoyed most or many of them. You may also, like me, have a hard time remembering exactly what happened in each film. You needn’t worry. The franchise’s Wikipedia page is filled with…
If you’ve ever played music or even just attempted to coax a pleasing sound from a keyboard or a guitar string, you may have some sense of the dissonant signals that the desire to make music can set off: Are you playing toward some idea of perfection, perhaps in the…
In the action thriller The Gunman, Sean Penn, at age 54, looks neither old nor young. He’s been in training to look this age for a long time. Even as a relative kid, in 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High, his sailor-on-shore-leave mug had a wry, quizzical roughness to it;…
There are two kinds of humanist movie. One kind shows human beings struggling against the most unspeakable horrors, sorrows, or injustices and still, somehow, emerging with their essential goodness intact. The second, thornier type gives us people doing terrible things to one another — screaming, cheating, and generally making life…
There’s no empowerment message embedded in Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella, no “Girls can do anything!” cheerleader vibe. That’s why it’s wonderful. This is a straight, no-chaser fairy story, a picture to be downed with pleasure. It worries little about sending the wrong message and instead trusts us to decode its politics,…
Even if you’ve never seen or heard of a movie called She Killed in Ecstasy, isn’t it lovely to know that such a thing exists in the world? That 1971 eroto-thriller was a creation of prolific Spanish-born writer-director Jess Franco, who had a lasting career making florid B movies with…
Almost immediately after it was released, the 2011 stealth hit Best Exotic Marigold Hotel became more a punchline than a movie. Who knew “older” people were so starved for pictures featuring gorgeously shot exotic locales, not to mention people falling in love, falling out of love, or desperately hoping for…
Is it possible to essentially like a movie yet feel revulsion toward its script? David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars is clearly intended as a sharp satire of Hollywood ambition, vanity, avarice, and emptiness, and it’s smart and astringently funny in places. Yet it seems to be fighting its own…
BERLIN — Riding from the Berlin-Tegel airport to my hotel on a crisp, sunny day last week, my cab passed the magnificent golden angel statue known as the Victory Column, a monument erected by the city in 1874 to commemorate assorted Prussian military victories of the day. But people all…
No matter how you end up feeling about it, there sure is a lot of movie in Mommy, Xavier Dolan’s exuberant melodrama about an emotional firecracker of a teenager who, after being kicked out of a specialized school for setting the cafeteria on fire, goes home to live with his…
Jude Law, once so shiny-penny-clean and pretty — and with the kind of chin dimple that might have inspired Audrey Hepburn to ask, as she did of Cary Grant in Charade, “How do you shave in there?” — is only now reaching the age where we can call his face…
Where we come from defines us more than we even realize: That’s the idea implicit in Andrey Zvyagintsev’s somber, sturdily elegant drama Leviathan, in which a mechanic who has lived on the same parcel of land all his life — as his father and grandfather did before him — resists…
Most of us can’t imagine having a disease that tugs and tears at the very threads of who we are. When we wake up in the middle of the night with outlandish fears, we strike reassuring bargains with ourselves: If I lose my sight, I’ll still have music. If I…
