A Dog’s Purpose, based on the novel by W. Bruce Cameron, combines the philosophical belief that living beings are reborn into a different physical body after biological death with the voiceover narrative technique of Look Who’s Talking. The main character, Dog, dies in multiple wrenching scenes and is subsequently reborn;…
Gold’s value lies chiefly in the hearts and minds of those who seek it. The noble metal has driven humans to perpetrate ignoble acts on their quests to unearth it since at least 5000 B.C.E., when slaves divined for golden veins to lavish their Pharaohs with jewelry. The Incas even…
Delving into microeconomics and macroaggressions, Toni Erdmann, the dynamite, superbly acted third feature by writer/director Maren Ade, is social studies at its finest. This quicksilver, emotionally astute comedy operates on many different registers and moods: Whoopee cushions and gag teeth are part of the fun, but so too is a…
High fives, hijabs, and one bloody track meet.
Emma Stone, for starters.
Baby craziness, a mid-life crisis, and Steve The Buzzkill.
Last June, after the death of Muhammad Ali, Michael Mann’s Will Smith–starring 2001 film Ali was briefly re-released in theaters. This allowed many of us to see it with fresh eyes. What felt like an ambitious but underwhelming biopic 15 years ago now seems more and more like a masterpiece…
M. Night Shyamalan appears again to be having a moment. His last film, 2015’s grandparents-gone-wrong horror flick The Visit, proved a small hit with critics and audiences alike, and his latest, this week’s multiple-personality abduction thriller Split, seems poised to do likewise. And why not? Both films are effective chillers…
Like its subject, the man who took McDonald’s from a single burger shop to a globe-straddling child-fattener, John Lee Hancock’s The Founder can’t stop selling. The first fast-food kitchen, set up in 1953 by the solemn McDonald brothers in San Bernardino, gets celebrated here as rousingly as John Glenn’s first…
Maybe it’s a just a sign of the Blumhouse-era horror-movie world we find ourselves in, but there’s something refreshing about a scare flick that (a) actually shows you its monster occasionally and (b) gives you a definite reason to be afraid of it. Hiding things in shadows to enhance audience…
Despite his reputation, M. Night Shyamalan has never lived and died by the twist. His best films, like Unbreakable or even last year’s cheerily nasty wicked-grandparents thriller The Visit, work first as accomplished, emotionally engaging suspense. What’s most memorable about them isn’t the final-act revelations or even the quietly impressive…
“Art is a lie that tells a truth,” Pablo Picasso once said. The aphorism animates Pablo Larraín’s canny and vigorous Neruda, a sidelong biopic of the preeminent Chilean poet and politician, featuring a brilliant Luis Gnecco in the title role, that’s equal parts fact and fiction. (Conversely, Larraín’s film also…
Walking out of Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson last May at Cannes, I felt like it was the closest the director had come to making an artistic manifesto. Having seen it again, I’m even more convinced. Jarmusch first arrived in New York back in the 1970s with dreams of becoming a poet,…
Say this for Sleepless: It gives Michelle Monaghan more to do than almost anything else you’ve seen her in lately, whether it beTrue Detective or Patriots Day, and confirms once again that she should be in the lead far more often than Hollywood would have you believe. The positives don’t…
Can Esme live??
Cosmo ate corn, and DJ cares.
Here’s what you need to know.
Post-crash times are tough.
“These shows aren’t about women’s issues, they’re about human rights issues.”
Near the end of Underworld, the 2003 film that launched the popular (and profitable) horror franchise, Viktor (Bill Nighy), king of the vampires, tries to kill the werewolf (a.k.a. Lycan) lover of his protégé, Selene (Kate Beckinsale), and she is not pleased. Grabbing a sword, Selene leaps straight up and…
In the ’80s and ’90s, there were action movies. They starred muscly guys like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone, or martial artists from Jean-Claude Van Damme to Cynthia Rothrock, or actors who were dedicated to the physical demands of the genre, like Bruce Willis or Wesley Snipes. They mostly told…
Almost all of the history of American movies flows into Steven Spielberg, and the movies that have come since can’t help but be in response. As a storyteller and as a cultural figure, his closest precedent isn’t John Ford or David Lean, but Dickens, another age’s popular titan, beloved more…
