The finished work, a half decade in the making, is informed by his deep familiarity with its characters, which might be one reason why he has the confidence to abandon traditional narrative structures and strike out on his own lyrical path
The January, February and March months of 2019 are already boasting a strong slate, with U.S. distribution of international festival favorites along with welcome returns of first-rate genre filmmakers like M. Night Shyamalan and Jordan Peele
It was a terrible year in so many ways, but onscreen, with shows including Sharp Objects, My Brilliant Friend, Better Call Saul, The Americans and Atlanta, it sparkled
Hollywood now begrudgingly must honor a company committed to upending the business model of theatrical distribution, but it’s hard to gainsay Netflix’s strategy in this instance
The art houses and Drafthouses again pull more than their fair share of the burden of quality, but my No. 2 (and many people’s No. 1) is a straight-up Netflix production, already available to watch on your phone
The movie experiences I treasure most from this year found me sharing moments and laughs and tears with strangers who, just before and after the house lights dimmed, I might have been arguing with on Twitter
Ring in the New Year!
At times, as it dissolves between scenes of its cast as literal toy dolls machine-gunning Nazis in the made-up Belgian town of Marwen, Zemeckis’ movie seems an inquisition into the limits of the director’s own imagination
Leder’s film mostly devotes itself to the future Supreme Court justice’s first world-shaking sex discrimination case, 1972’s Moritz v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue: Ginsburg and her husband … argued against a discriminatory statute before the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals
Don’t look to Vice for psychology or even a sense of presence; McKay uses the Cheneys’ grim unknowability as an excuse not to bother going for either
Baldwin’s central story, dialogue and time-jumping narrative structure are all in place, but so, too, is a sumptuous visual style that serves to deepen the novelist’s themes of racial injustice and the powerful countering force of love
This time, though, the lessons are urgent, the jungle threatened by man, the wicked tiger Shere Khan (Benedict Cumberbatch) a true terror vowing to one day taste that boy’s blood
Not incidental to Aquaman’s pleasures is its vision of a mixed-race hero, played by a mixed-race actor, fighting to protect and understand clashing aspects of his heritage
True to the spirit of the chipper, somewhat aimless live-action Disney day killers that inspired it, Rob Marshall’s Mary Poppins Returns gets better the further it wanders from its actual story.
With the quickest blink or nervy glance, Roberts communicates to us both what her character, an ordinary woman named Holly Burns, has convinced everyone around her to think she’s feeling but also all of her secret doubts, fury and anguish
What will go you see this weekend?
It sets a host of alternative Spider-folk running amok in the New York City of Brooklyn teen Miles Morales, the mixed-race Spider-Man (his father is black and his mother Latinx) invented for the comics in 2011 by Brian Michael Bendis and Sara Pichelli
The film plays as if a three-hour epic has been sliced down to size in the editing, but only the scenes establishing character and context have been cut
The actresses share only one scene in the film, but Mary Queen of Scots sets them up in counterpoint, two divergent approaches to the question of how women who wield power can actually govern the men around them
This time, we meet the sharecropping peasants of the remote village of Inviolata, living lives of seasonal toil, lives that look — except for the occasional radio or lightbulb — like they might have a century or so ago
And much of the present-day free-skate footage, shot at what have come to be known as “Adult Nights” at skating rinks, also proves invigorating, an invitation to relish the momentum, the joy and the peacocking pride of grown-up skaters
What will you go see this weekend?
