Bridges continues to be one of the most authentic actors out there, even in the role of ass-kicker: you believe Bridges in “The Old Man” cooking eggs and listening to someone share a sad life story, just as much as you do watching him scuffle for his life against a younger, bigger assassin in a flipped-over…

Well-paced and genuinely tense, Stephan Rick’s The Good Neighbor is a familiar kind of thriller. Based on the premise alone, it’s easy to see how the plot will unfold, even when one actually begins watching the film. Miraculously, though, that doesn’t do much to undermine the suspense Rick steadily builds over its runtime. This isn’t a movie that…

Maggie (Cate Blanchett) is a nineteenth-century frontier doctor who lives on an isolated ranch in New Mexico with her two daughters Lilly (Evan Rachel Wood), a refined teenager who feels as if she was born in the wrong family, and her younger sister Dot (Jenna Boyd), a tomboy interested in horses and the adventure of…

“The American” allows George Clooney to play a man as starkly defined as a samurai. His fatal flaw, as it must be for any samurai, is love. Other than that, the American is perfect: Sealed, impervious and expert, with a focus so narrow it is defined only by his skills and his master. Here is…

A superb psychological Western directed by Russell Rouse (“The Thief”-1952) from a story “The Last Notch” by Frank D. Gilroy, who also provides the screenplay. The impressive opening scene has ruthless gunslinger Vinnie Harold (Broderick Crawford) ride into town with his two-man gang of Taylor Swope (John Dehner) and Dink Wells (Noah Beery Jr), and…

THE WRATH OF GOD is a new Netflix movie from Argentina (org. title La Ira de Dios). We’re in the drama, mystery, and thriller genres. And yes, quite a few people will die before the end credits. However, in this movie, it’s more about who is left behind than who dies. This movie has exactly the kind…

“Legends of the Fall” is an epic Western saga about a beautiful woman from back East, and the three sons of a Montana rancher who loved her and fought for her, told against the backdrop of World War I. This is the kind of story that usually appears in an interminable series of paperback novels…

The opening words of Barry Levinson’s “Sleepers” are, “This is a true story about friendship that runs deeper than blood.” That’s careless writing; how, exactly, does it run deeper than blood, and how deep is blood?  The film tells the story of four friends from the west side of New York–Hell’s Kitchen–and how they grow…

“Operation Mincemeat” looks like a proper British spy drama and for the most part, well, it is. It’s based on the true story of wartime daring and heroism, features a classy cast including Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen and has a director in John Madden (“Shakespeare in Love,” the “Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” movies) who’s made his name with…

The Northman demands audiences deconstruct overbearing patriarchal values, toxic masculine heroism, and the folly of revenge by pulling viewers through extreme devotion to familial honor. Eggers’ brand of psychological shock is bolder here than his prior works and potent in bursts, but barely works on boldness alone. With “The Northman,” Eggers uses slick aesthetics and broad…

Omar Sy returns as Ousmane Diakité, the kind of cop who can hold his own even when he’s outnumbered and in a cage. So much, that he beats up a hulking MMA fighter in his own ring and ends the scene on a triumphant note where he makes the crowd shout, “The police! The police! The police!” Ousmane’s…

Toscana follows Theo (Anders Matthesen) as he ventures from Denmark to Tuscany following the death of his father. With his new restaurant back home struggling to reach the end of development, Theo needs cash — something he could get from the sale of the castle owned by his father in Italy. However, upon his arrival there,…

“Happening” is a period film set in 1960s France showing the predicaments its desperate protagonist goes through to access an illegal and unsafe abortion. Through an exquisite artistic grip on the material (adapted from Annie Ernaux’s autobiographical novel), Diwan’s subtle handling of the era very much propels the aforementioned disorienting and timeless feel of the movie….

“King Richard” is half sports movie, half biopic. As such, it hits the sweet spots and sour notes of both genres. Depending on your perspective, this is either an invitation or a warning. Fans of the preternaturally talented tennis superstars Venus and Serena Williams will flock to this origin story when it makes its simultaneous debut in…

One of the most beautiful pictures I have seen this year. “Belfast” is unquestionably Kenneth Branagh’s most personal film to date, but it’s also sure to have universal resonance. It depicts a violent, tumultuous time in Northern Ireland, but it does so through the innocent, exuberant eyes of a nine-year-old boy. And it’s shot in gentle…

Jim Broadbent, who cut an impressively tragicomic figure in Michell’s bittersweet old-age/New Wave charmer Le Week-end (2013), plays Kempton Bunton, a real-life figure who achieved notoriety in the mid-60s after the theft of Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery. We meet Bunton in the dock in London, pleading not guilty to pilfering said painting, of…

“Red Rocket” is another entry in the subgenre of movies about narcissistic, sociopathic, motormouthed players who bike through life on their looks and/or charm. The main character of this one is Mikey Saber (Simon Rex), a former porn star who looks good for a guy who’s pushing 50 and spent 20 years living like there was no…

Basking in post-coital serenity, actor and theater director Yûsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and his wife, screenwriter Oto (Reika Kirishima), verbally build a story for her next television project. They speak of a teenage girl so infatuated with a classmate she infiltrates his home to steal unmissed souvenirs. Their spontaneous fiction sets in as one of…

Popularly viewed as Peckinpah’s first accomplished film following the compromised The Deadly Companions (1961), Ride the High Country (1962) has been mostly seen as the director’s farewell to the traditional Western formula while incorporating features that faintly anticipate future creative developments in his work. While offering no real challenge to the achievements of later Western masterpieces such as Major Dundee (1965), The…

It’s both frustrating and exciting to see Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino persistently compared to Federico Fellini. The comparison is warranted, to an extent. Like Fellini, Sorrentino (“This Must Be the Place,” “The Consequences of Love”) has a baroque and immersive style. He also has a carnivalesque/sideshow sense of humor: his new film “The Great Beauty” features, amongst other…

The plot is cast in the time-proven Hollywood adventure tradition. A space explorer from Earth (Charles Heston) crash-lands on an unknown planet where apes rank higher than men on the evolutionary ladder. He tries to convince his captors he is intelligent; there are some good action sequences; some amusing twists; some easily digestible sociological and…

The movie begins well, with an early scene where Mira Sorvino plays a woman whose purse is snatched in front of the store. Keitel races after the little boy who grabbed it, and hauls him back to the store, only to discover that Sorvino has taken pity on him and doesn’t want to press charges. Keitel, who…

In “Marry Me” you know exactly what you’re going to get. It may feel like a remix of “Notting Hill,” with an adorably dorky ordinary guy falling for a glamorous superstar, but it is based on a web comic-turned series of graphic novels by Bobby Crosby and Remy “Eisu” Mokhtar. Lopez plays Kat Valdez, a thrice-divorced pop superstar….

There’s something very charming about an outlaw who shows us his good side. Sure, he breaks laws; but in a pinch, his instinct to do the truly right thing blazes in, just in the nick of time. He’s often the anti-hero with a tough, crusty exterior and vulnerable mush inside. The lovable cad. In John Ford’s technicolor…

There’s a good deal of talent involved with the 1955 Western “The Tall Men”. The legendary Raoul Walsh directs Clark Gable, Jane Russell, Robert Ryan and Cameron Mitchell in a film that should have amounted to more than expectations might have anticipated. That isn’t to say “The Tall Man” isn’t good. It’s a reasonably entertaining…

Frontier is a historical epic that capitalizes on the best features of prestige television. It’s sprawling, diverse, and detailed, with an eye towards complicating simple assumptions about its subjects. Because we’re in the midst of a glut of shows touting prestige markers, “Frontier” at first seems to be just another show parading its blood, guts,…

Los Herederos de la Tierra aka Heirs to the Land is a realistic historical drama that is about Hugo Llor becoming a winemaker after his struggles throughout his life filled with poverty and pain. The series starts with Hugo losing his father to the sea and his mother and sister being left grief-stricken thereafter. There…

Last Kingdom follows the story of King Alfred’s dream of a united England with the perspective of our protagonist Uhtred, son of Uhtred and his men. Though, the show focuses on the story of England, one of its major plot points has been Uhtred’s desire to reclaim Bebbanburg from his treacherous uncle. Fans of the…

Introducing a brand new storytelling device during the penultimate episode of a six seasons-long series is a bold move, but How To Get Away With Murder loves to go big, especially when it has backed itself into a narrative corner. The show is undeniably good at blowing shit up. And it does so spectacularly in this episode….

Netflix’s newest Spanish original series, The Innocent (El Inocente), was released on the streaming platform on April 30. Adapted from a Harlan Coben novel, the eight-part series is a suspenseful thriller with an intriguing structure. As this story contains so many twists and turns, this article may contain some minor spoilers (but no major ones). The series transposes…

Safe is set in a bourgeois gated community somewhere in England. It is a good place to set a drama, and at first glance it looks like how you imagine those places would be: big kitchens with concertina doors on to nice outdoor areas, pools, Audis and Range Rovers, community barbecues, a little light adultery,…

Adapted from the Spanish novel La Catedral del Mar, Cathedral Of The Sea is a highly ambitious, impressively shot period drama rife with gorgeous cinematography and a slowly unravelling story. Split across 8 episodes clocking in around an hour a piece, the characters are given enough time to grow with believable arcs, especially Arnau who’s…

“Against the Ice” delivers all the delirious period drama thrills and survival horror angst that you could want from a movie with that title. Within a very short amount of time, Coster-Waldau and Joe Derrick set up their story—an adaptation of Arctic explorer Ejnar Mikkelsen’s memoir Two Against the Ice—as the sort of grisly and high-toned boy’s adventure story…

That magical connection between Pedro Almodóvar and Penelope Cruz continues to grow stronger and burn brighter with “Parallel Mothers,” their eighth film together over the past quarter century. The Spanish maestro knows precisely how to get all the colors out of his charismatic muse, and in turn, the veteran star takes his material and makes it feel both fiery…

The world is dealing with grief right now on a massive scale. There’s the direct grief of the amount of death that people have faced in the last two years, but also a grieving of ways of life that have shifted, possibly forever, and the divisions that the pandemic clarified in society. With “After Yang,”…

YOU tells the story of a young bookstore manager named Joe Goldberg, played by Gossip Girl’s Penn Badgley. When a beautiful girl named Beck (Elizabeth Lail) comes into the bookstore one day, it sparks an obsession with Joe that leads to some very questionable and frightening behavior. In the first five episodes given to critics, we got a…

Gaga rules in Ridley Scott’s drama based on the true-life sagas of the Italian fashion dynasty “The most Gucci of them all” is how Patrizia Reggiani described herself in a 2014 interview and, judging by this entertainingly ripe, comedically tinged tragedy, she has a point. Variously known as “Lady Gucci” and “Black Widow”, Reggiani became…

A woman – a normal, slightly dissatisfied woman – goes to the beach. She goes for a swim and, out of nowhere, is gripped by a strange sensation. She returns to the shore, hugs her son, eats a pear and then stabs a man to death. Why? Did she know the victim? Did his sexy…

The main plot of Stay Close centres on Megan (Cush Jumbo), whose idyllic life, loving family and perfect kitchen are evidence that she is the keeper of a Secret Past that will soon rear its ugly head and threaten everything she holds dear. And so it proves. Carlton Flynn, a young man in a distinctive…

Season two of The Witcher (Netflix) lets us settle again into the granite-muscled embrace of Henry Cavill as Geralt of Rivia, a wandering warrior looking for his place on the Continent – a faux-medieval land full of awful creatures, scheming rulers and forests that spend half their time on fire. Last time out, the epic…

Terrence Malick’s “The New World” strips away all the fancy and lore from the story of Pocahontas and her tribe and the English settlers at Jamestown, and imagines how new and strange these people must have seemed to one another. If the Indians stared in disbelief at the English ships, the English were no less…

Oliver Stone’s JFK is not a film about the facts of the assassination, but about the feelings. “JFK” accurately reflects the state of mind since Nov. 22, 1963. We feel the whole truth has not been told, that more than one shooter was involved, that somehow maybe the CIA, the FBI, Castro, the anti-Castro Cubans,…

Helmed by Kyrre Holm Johannessen and Ronit Weiss-Berkowitz, the Hebrew-Norwegian bilingual political thriller series ‘The Girl from Oslo’ (originally ‘Bortfort’) unveils a chilling and cathartic vision of a world under constant terror. While its charge on terrorism resonates deep within a region looking for the miracle of peace, the series also asks pertinent questions about the war…

Set in Argentina in 1980, “Azor” is a quiet, unhurried, un-flashy film, and that’s what makes it unnerving. You come away from it feeling that you’ve been given a greater understanding of how authoritarian power-grabs happen. The takeaway feeling isn’t, “Oh, the humanity,” but, “What would I do if I were in that world? Would I…

Sandra (Clare Dunne) has a code word with her daughter Emma (Ruby Rose O’Hara). If Sandra whispers “black widow,” then Emma knows to run for help, as happens in the harrowing first scene of “Herself,” an Irish film written by Dunne, and directed by Phyllida Lloyd. Sandra takes one look at her husband (played with frightening immediacy…

There’s nothing really wrong with this glossy tale of a “mission impossible” raid on a heavily fortified Madrid bank to retrieve treasure, as slickly directed by Jaume Balaguero of the “[rec]” series. It’s just that a caper of this type needs tense set pieces, surprising twists, idiosyncratic characters or charismatic stars — ideally, all the above —…

The movies have always been glib in how they depict mental illness. And there are a few minutes at the beginning of “Paper Spiders” where you can wonder if we aren’t about to be treated to more of the same. A clingy, widowed Mom (Lili Taylor) makes inappropriate remarks and superstitious dismissals of the school to her…

“Diving is the most fabulous distraction you can experience,” Jacques Cousteau once said. And as the early moments of Liz Garbus’ intimate and deeply informative documentary “Becoming Cousteau” remind the audience, the pioneer was always in his most comfortable state underwater—so much that he once defined the misery of emerging from the blue depths as being…

Rian Johnson’s “Knives Out” is the work of a cinematic magician, one who keeps you so focused on what the left hand is doing that you miss the right. And, in this case, it’s not just a wildly fun mystery to unravel but a scathing bit of social commentary about where America was in 2019….

Dame Maggie Smith plays the vinegary Aunt Ruth, a last-minute babysitter for three children who are still in mourning for their mother. It is Christmas Eve, but their father Matt (Joel Fry), sad and distracted, has decided they will skip the holiday this year. There will be no decorations or presents. After he leaves for a work…