Arts & Culture

“…It wasn’t about giving a hundred percent, it was about giving a thousand percent.”

You’re right not to trust a film critic who calls a move stunning. But let me say this about Human Flow, the epic new documentary surveying the scope of the global refugee crisis, from Chinese artist/activist Ai Weiwei: It stunned me, in the truest sense of the word. Again and…

Fifty years ago, in 1967, Cool Hand Luke, The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, In the Heat of the Night, and The Dirty Dozen rocked American cinemas. And somewhere in a field outside Pittsburgh, George Romero and John Russo were shooting on black-and-white 16mm film a low-budget movie that would found…

The last few months have seen some welcome innovation in the cry-along subgenre of dramas about finding the will to keep living after bodily catastrophe. First, in the notably sincere and unsensational Stronger, director David Gordon Green and his crew strove to strip away as much of such films’ usual…

In the opening shot of Only the Brave, a flaming bear — not just a bear that happens to be burning but one that looks as if it had been created entirely from fire — lunges at the camera in the middle of a blazing forest. The image returns a…

My favorite biopics — those that tell any portion of a real person’s story faithfully — are those that borrow from other genres. Pablo Larrain’s Jackie possesses the kinetic punch of a horror film. Mario Van Peebles’ Baadasssss! is a sharp comedy. And Mike Leigh’s Topsy Turvy is a cutting…

The labyrinthine nature of memory, trauma and guilt is made concrete in Benedict Andrews’ Una, a film that intermittently sends its characters wandering around what looks like an actual maze. In the title role, Rooney Mara puts her perpetually haunted gaze to good use as a melancholy woman whiling her…