Alien: Romulus 20th Century Studios Read One of the most influential science fiction horror films of all time, Alien had its world premiere on May 25, 1979 as the opening […]Read More
Biopics are notoriously fraught with difficulty. They have to achieve an emotional and intellectual resonance, as well as a period look and feel. The script has to reflect and enhance the inherent drama in the lives of its characters, and the main one really has to matter. In Oppenheimer, the British-American writer-director Christopher Nolan embraces the challenge of Read More
Biopics are notoriously fraught with difficulty. They have to achieve an emotional and intellectual resonance, as well as a period look and feel. The script has to reflect and enhance the inherent drama in the lives of its characters, and the main one really has to matter. In Oppenheimer, the British-American writer-director Christopher Nolan embraces the challenge of Read More
You might not have imagined a connection between the new Barbie and the acclaimed 2001: A Space Odyssey. True enough, Barbie the toy character does have pilot and astronaut on her résumé. In this case, however, she makes her big screen appearance to the accompaniment of Also sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss, enhanced by the droll narration of Dame Helen Mirren. Read More
When Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) laments to Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) that “you’re playing four-sided chess with an algorithm,” his character couldn’t possibly have appreciated the irony of his words. The seventh and latest installment in the Mission: Impossible franchise has burst onto theatrical screens just as the actor-members of SAG-AFTRA have gone on strike. The Read More
Welcome back to the Multiverse. If the most recent Academy Award winner for Best Picture, Everything Everywhere All at Once, stoked your interest in compelling alternate realities, then the latest installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe merits your attention, too. This movie has intelligence, humor, relatable themes and dazzlingly crafted animation.Read More
Joseph Bologne lived a fascinating–indeed, important–life. The French aristocracy of the late eighteenth century welcomed, then disowned, him.Read More
Alithea Binnie, a scholar of mythology, believes in credibility. Then she encounters The Djinn, who spins fanciful and unreliable tales of lost love and palace intrigue. Her independence and his freedom become the themes of the fantasy-romance, Three Thousand Years of Longing.Read More
When evaluating a documentary, you might ask several questions. Does the film have a clear protagonist, or several? Does it have a compelling story and message? Does it have substance and depth? Has the director organized the material in a coherent way? In the case of Alex Pritz’s new movie, The Territory, the answers are a resounding “Yes.”Read More
In a year dominated by cinematic tentpoles, sequels, blockbusters and superheroes, along comes a sweet, unabashedly romantic fairy tale. It’s not loud or brash or cynical. It’s just charming.Read More
Eight twenty-somethings gather at a mansion for a “hurricane party.” After some awkward introductions, they begin indulging in drugs and alcohol. With inhibitions fading and the storm now raging, they decide to play “Body Body,” the murder-in-the-dark game. Only in this case, an actual body count ensues. There you have the premise for the new horror-comedy film from Dutch Read More
Baz Luhrmann has always had a flair for the operatic, sometimes literally so. The Australian writer-director-designer loves to tell stories on a grand scale. The bigger the emotions, the flashier the production values. Romeo and Juliet, Toulouse-Lautrec and the Great Gatsby have all made appearances in his films. Now his spotlight turns to the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Elvis Read More
According to the real-life paleontologists, dinosaurs disappeared from Earth 66 million years ago. To judge by the sixth entry in the Jurassic Park franchise, its fresh story ideas have been exhausted as well. The original wonder has waned.Read More
For the longest time, it just wouldn’t fly. A sequel to Top Gun {1986), one of the highest-grossing movies of its decade. The movie that made the charismatic Tom Cruise box office gold. Even when the sequel finally came to fruition, the pandemic delayed its release by two years.Read More
The MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) made its debut fourteen years ago this month, as a glib and charismatic Robert Downey, Jr. established his superhero credentials as Iron Man. That universe has expanded steadily ever since, although in ways that could easily elude the geometrically challenged.Read More
If you’re a devoted fan of Downton Abbey, the global television phenomenon now back on the big screen, that line certainly rings true. Creator and writer Julian Fellowes, director Simon Curtis (the real-life husband of Elizabeth McGovern/Cora Grantham), a superb ensemble cast and composer John Lunn have crafted another period piece drama brimming with intelligence, Read More
Sometimes a filmmaker tells a story so dense, so deliberately ambiguous, so deeply rooted in symbolic imagery that you realize you’re either intrigued by and invested in the narrative or you’re utterly defeated by the process. The memory of Men, a hallucinatory study in toxic masculinity, will linger long after the closing credits. Read More
Let’s start with the paradoxes. The latest film from Oscar- and Emmy-winning writer-director Aaron Sorkin boasts several. Its two protagonists don’t look all that much like the historical characters they portray (although Nicole Kidman with red hair comes pretty close). The female lead, a comedy legend, has very few funny lines in the story. And, although the movie has the Read More
Steven Spielberg’s latest picture arrives in theatres with not only the weight of history and expectation, but also the bittersweet memories of his father and the work’s lyricist. Arnold Spielberg, the film’s dedicatee, died in August, 2020, and Stephen Sondheim passed away last month.Read More
Twenty years ago, Will Smith accepted the challenge of portraying a living legend, and arguably reached the zenith of his acting career, in Ali. In his latest film, he plays the obsessive, controlling father of sibling tennis phenoms in King Richard. It marks another high point for him. Read More
The writer, director and graphic artist Mike Mills loves to explore family. His own family, to be precise. In Beginners (2010), for which the late Christopher Plummer won an Academy Award, Mills dramatizes his elderly father’s gay relationship with a much younger man. In 20th Century Women (2016), for which Mills himself earned an Oscar nomination for Original Screenplay, Read More
“The Irish are built to leave,” as one character ruefully observes in Sir Kenneth Branagh’s new film, his twenty-second behind the camera. Indeed, many have departed the home soil, but their abiding attachment to it has prompted a wealth of insight and inspiration. You can add Belfast to the mix.Read More
The risk of the project was destined to match the scale of journalist-turned-author Frank Herbert's Dune. Denis Villeneuve's conception has arrived in theatres (and HBO Max), and its sequel has already been greenlighted by Warner Bros. After two viewings, his intentions have become more clear and convincing.Read More
“I’ve got this kind of gift. I can see people, places. Things others can’t.” Eloise (a wide-eyed Thomasin McKenzie) can, indeed, have experiences denied to others, especially when it comes to swinging London of the 1960s, her obsession. In Edgar Wright’s psychological thriller, her gift becomes a nightmare.Read More
Sometimes, movie plots don't have to fully explain themselves, or play out in strictly linear fashion, to succeed. Sometimes, a film's intelligence and atmosphere achieve the desired effect. Welcome to The Night House.Read More
NWPB's Steve Reeder review's Disney's latest, long awaited movie, Jungle Cruise. Read More
By curious coincidence, two of the lovelier movies I've seen so far this summer — the family-friendly animated fable Luca and the German art-house fairy tale Undine — tell stories about mythic sea creatures making contact with the human world. That's hardly a new concept, as we've seen in films as different as The Shape of Water, Aquaman and countless versions of The Read More
There have been many fine films over the past several years about characters struggling with the onset of Alzheimer's disease and dementia, like Away From Her, Still Alice and the recent Colin Firth/Stanley Tucci drama Supernova. But few of them have gone as deeply and unnervingly into the recesses of a deteriorating mind as The Father, a powerful new chamber drama built Read More
Filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, now 90, has a gift for making riveting cinema from the minutiae of the everyday. His latest is a four-and-a-half hour documentary starring Boston City Hall, pre-COVID-19.Read More
Though Anne Hathaway throws herself into the role of the Grand High Witch with obvious relish, she often seems to be straining for effect — which leaves The Witches feeling flat. Read More
Ethan Hawke plays the famed Serbian American inventor in a new film that reminds us what a modern creature Tesla was — a figure from the past who never stopped pointing the way to the future.Read More
Rosamund Pike stars in Radioactive, a biography of the pioneering scientist, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the only person to claim it in two different scientific disciplines (physics and chemistry). The director, Marjane Satrapi, the Oscar-nominated Iranian-French graphic novelist and filmmaker (Persepolis), tells the story in an ambitious but uneven fashion.Read More
First the town disappears from Google Maps. Then a UFO appears — and a water truck is riddled with bullet holes. Bacurau is a community portrait, a horror thriller and a work of political filmmaking.Read More
Autumn de Wilde's adaptation of the Jane Austen classic is as clever and rich as its famous heroine — in part, because its actors are so good at finding fresh nuances in this timeless material.Read More
Writer-director Bertrand Bonello uses the tale of a Haitian zombie to explore intergenerational racial trauma in this quiet, moody film. Read More
This adaptation of attorney Bryan Stevenson's book about a wrongly condemned black man dramatizes that case while offering an unflinching look at the death penalty.Read More
Gerwig gives us the warm, homespun pleasures of Louisa May Alcott's beloved novel, but she also holds the well-worn text up to the light to consider some of its flaws and compromises.Read More
Minhal Baig's new film about a Pakistani American teen captures what it's like to feel paralyzed, with one foot in adulthood and the other in childhood. Read More
Life doesn't go according to plan for the family at the center of this wrenching drama. But while Waves doesn't peddle easy redemption, it does offer what feels like a state of grace.Read More
The new Netflix movie starring Aaron Paul as a desperate Jesse, on the run immediately after the events of the Breaking Bad finale, explores the trauma that his association with Walter White created.Read More
Justin Chon's third feature, about a karaoke hostess forced to deal with her estranged brother while her father is dying, possesses an "emotional impact [that] is loudest in its quiet moments."Read More
Two sisters (co-writers Hannah Pearl Utt and Jen Tullock) learn that their dead mother (Judith Light) is alive — and starring in a soap opera — in this "wise, witty and richly specific" film.Read More
A young Russian-American (Chris Galust) drives a beat-up medical transport van full of demanding, quirky passengers through Milwaukee's backstreets in this funny, authentic film.Read More
Disney's Lion King is so realistic-looking that, paradoxically, you can't believe a moment of it. The computer-generated blockbuster feels like the world's most expensive safari-themed karaoke video.Read More
Richard Billingham documented his parents' neglect and abuse in previous documentary projects. His first narrative film captures their brutality even as it affords them some measure of dignity.Read More
The breezy rom-com is set in a world where only one man remembers the fab four. The film so takes our affection for The Beatles for granted that it never bothers to give the music a proper showcase.Read More
Though it's as dazzling as you'd expect from a Pixar animation, Toy Story 4 is also more ungainly than its predecessors, with coarser humor and audacious plot leaps that don't always pay off. Read More
Ron Howard's new Pavarotti film fails to make us feel much for its subject, and does little to bolster the magical, complicated art called opera. Read More
Amy Poehler directs and stars in this Netflix film that, while light on laughs and conflict, delivers a "cozy reunion happy hour and an ode to female friendships."Read More
First-time writer-director Robert D. Krzykowski's odd, flashback-besotted film is a love letter to its leading man, who plays a World War II veteran struggling to remember his past.Read More