Film, TV & Streaming

Denis Villeneuve picks up where Ridley Scott left off, with mostly successful results.

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…

Over the phone from his Los Angeles office, David Lynch tells me, “It was all Harry Dean. I’d do anything for Harry Dean.” The visionary director is referring to taking on an acting role in John Carroll Lynch’s directorial debut, Lucky, which stars Harry Dean Stanton, and is largely based…

Wherever he turned up onscreen, it seemed like he belonged there.

It was filmed in Arizona — and features the actor who plays Georgie.

First They Killed My Father premieres on Netflix on September 15. It would have been easy for Angelina Jolie’s adaptation of Cambodian genocide survivor Loung Ung’s 2000 memoir to go ruthlessly and repeatedly for the emotional jugular. First They Killed My Father is, after all, the story of a young…

Top of the Lake: China Girl airs on SundanceTV Jane Campion’s initial plan for Top of the Lake, her SundanceTV drama about sexual violence in a rural New Zealand town, was for the story of haunted detective Robin Griffin (Elisabeth Moss) to come to a full stop at the end…

Strong Island premieres on Netflix on September 15. The tragic truth remains that all it takes in America for a white person to get away with killing a black person is for the white person to convince the right people — a judge, a jury, a prosecutor — of his…

In Columbus, architecture takes the place of emotions, to sometimes startling effect. An outwardly chilly, resolutely static film that nevertheless finds poignancy in the most surprising places, Kogonada’s directorial debut does a couple of important things so well that I can’t help but forgive the things it doesn’t. (Kogonada, by…

Say what you will about James Cameron, but the man commits. Stories of the director’s perfectionism, his control-freak mania and his sheer drive are legion, but I’m talking about something more fundamental to the work itself. Whereas most action filmmakers are content to let emotion and morality take a backseat…

Our resident GoT expert weighs in.

Fire Chasers premieres September 8 on Netflix. The greatest surprise is the beauty. The gripping new Netflix documentary series Fire Chasers opens with visions of orange-and-black hell, of ash and apocalypse, of California homes and trees and horizons ablaze, of the sky itself now some jack-o’-lantern’s smile. The fire brightens…

It floats in the darkness, unspooling onscreen with a sepulchral glow. It has waited for what seems like an eternity to meet the eyes of its audience, and it senses in them both anticipation and dread. Yes, there was that bizarre miniseries back in 1990 (God, remember Tim Curry in…

In Eliza Hittman’s debut feature, It Felt Like Love, a young girl tests the waters of adult sexuality, offering her body up to the statuesque bros who live in her Eastern Seaboard beach town. She tries her hardest to mimic the women in pornos, the ones all the boys want,…

In adapting for the screen the long, hard story of Colin Warner — a Trinidadian native who, as a Brooklyn teenager in 1980, was wrongfully convicted of murder and sent to prison for more than 20 years — Matt Ruskin’s Crown Heights moves along in a counterproductive hurry. Scenes rich…

Is there a more telling symptom of the sickness afflicting studio filmmaking right now than the fact that there aren’t more good Reese Witherspoon comedies out there? In eras past, a hit could be built more years than not around a star like her. Sunny yet tart, she’s a romantic…

The original French title of Belgian director Joachim Lafosse’s latest domestic drama is L’economie du couple, which translates (awkwardly) as “The Economy of the Couple.” It’s understandable that a U.S. distributor would opt instead for the rather nondescript and bland After Love — who the hell wants to see a…