Arts & Culture

One of the more welcome developments of recent years in independent films and documentaries has been the swing away from rough, handheld aesthetics — which dominated the early 2000s — toward a more elegant, cinematically sophisticated approach. The verite style is usually coded as authentic and immediate, but it can…

Mike White’s father-and-son college-trip comedy-drama Brad’s Status is legitimately more frightening than anything in It. Quite aside from the fact that real life is always scarier than monsters from the beyond, the writer-director’s deep understanding of envy, entitlement and embarrassment has never been more nightmarishly effective. But don’t expect one…

There’s no delicate way to say this, so I’ll just spit it out. I spent the first 10 minutes of Stronger, David Gordon Green’s eventually potent drama of trauma and recovery, trying to work out whether star Jake Gyllenhaal was intending to suggest that the real-life Bostonian at the story’s…

In Battle of the Sexes, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’ film rehashing the most infamous tennis match in modern history, Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) must brawl with the coed United States Tennis Association for equal pay as she comes to terms with her attraction to women and what might be…

The sequel to 2015’s hit Kingsman: The Secret Service won’t make you feel the urgent need to take a shower and/or throw up, like the original probably did. Believe it or not, that’s not always a good thing. Kingsman: The Golden Circle, Matthew Vaughn’s follow-up to his brutal, joyfully degenerate…

Darren Aronofsky’s mother! is so much movie that critics April Wolfe and Alan Scherstuhl have elected to sync up Pacific Rim-style to take it on. Warning: The discussion below delves right into what we might call spoilers if a movie like mother! could be spoiled. Now let’s drift. April, Each…