Aida (a fantastic Jasna Djuricic) is a translator for the UN in the town of Srebenica in Bosnia in 1995 in this true story. At that time, a war between the Serbians and Bosnians had led to incredible bloodshed but the Serbians were at a point wherein they overtook Srebenica, leading the UN soldiers and…

In Emma Seligman’s delightfully anxiety-driven comedy “Shiva Baby,” the post-funeral service rites of a Jewish family and friends are interrupted by a chaotic series of one-upmanships and unexpected guests. Based on Seligman’s short of the same name, “Shiva Baby” follows Danielle on her way to meet her family for the somber occasion after an appointment with her…

Based on the French novel by Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera has been adapted many times. But it is Andrew Lloyd Webber’s stage and film musical which is arguably the most familiar to audiences. In Webber’s version, the orphaned Christine Daae has been raised in a Parisian opera house where she also works as a…

“The Last of the Mohicans,” a rapturous revision of the schoolroom classic, follows the trail blazed by “Dances With Wolves” and more recently “Unforgiven.” A rousing frontier saga drawn from James Fenimore Cooper’s “The Leatherstocking Tales,” it looks back with longing on the savage Eden of 18th-century America, a lush old-growth wilderness from which mountains…

“White Heat,” about the final months in a gang leader’s life, is a ruthless tale, ruthlessly told—an artistic peak for its star James Cagney and its director, Raoul Walsh.   “White Heat,” starring Cagney as Cody Jarrett, the mother-fixated, migraine-addled leader of a vicious gang of robbers, is one example. The cast is filled with skilled Hollywood…

Zach Sobiech was a high school senior when he uploaded his song, “Clouds,” to YouTube. It became a viral hit, leading to a recording contract and a concert performance. Wildly enthusiastic fans sang along with the chorus: “We’ll go up, up, up but I’ll fly a little higher, go up in the clouds because the…

Movies like “The Little Things” feel like a vanishing breed. In the wake of the success of “The Silence of the Lambs” there seemed to be a dark, brooding thriller adaptation every week with titles like “The Bone Collector” and it felt like half of them starred Denzel Washington. In recent years, this genre has…

The Black cowboy is part of a rich American story that spans centuries and seldom goes explored in cinema or in reality. Netflix’s “Concrete Cowboy” explores a more recent iteration of this culture, the Black “urban cowboys” who have populated North Philadelphia for the past 100 years. Like ‘Nomadland” this film features real-life members of…

The United States was founded in 1776, but the modern America we live in today, argues Netflix’s new six-part legal docuseries Amend, was born in 1868, with the ratification of the 14th amendment in the wake of the Civil War. Originally intended to grant citizenship to the formerly enslaved, the 14th, by promising all citizens “equal…

Ridley Scott’s “1492: Conquest of Paradise” sees Christopher Columbus as more complex and humane than in the other screen treatments of the character. His Columbus is an enlightened revision of the traditional figure, treating Indians the same as Spanish noblemen and seeming content with the notion that nature, not the Catholic God, is their deity….

If a thriller movie like this is going to work, it has to work moment by moment and scene by scene — and “Marathon Man” does. I enjoy thrillers for the people and predicaments in them, not for their clockwork plots. “Marathon Man” is almost all people and predicaments — or, more exactly, one person…

Almost all of David Mamet’s movies involve some kind of con game. Sometimes it is a literal con, as in “House of Games,” where a character is deliberately deceived by fraudsters. Sometimes it is an inadvertent con, as in “Things Change,” where an old shoeshine man is mistaken for the head of the Chicago mob….

Clint Eastwood’s “Blood Work” opens with an FBI agent of retirement age chasing a killer and collapsing of a heart attack. Two years later, we meet him living on a boat in a marina, with another person’s heart in his chest. A woman asks him to investigate the murder of her sister. He says he…

“Gran Torino” stars Eastwood as an American icon once again — this time as a cantankerous, racist, beer-chugging retired Detroit autoworker who keeps his shotgun ready to lock and load. Dirty Harry on a pension, we’re thinking, until we realize that only the autoworker retired; Dirty Harry is still on the job. Eastwood plays the…

My favorite character in “A Room with a View” is George Emerson, the earnest, passionate young man whose heart beats fiercely with love for Lucy Honeychurch. She is a most respectable young woman from a good family, who has been taken to Italy on the grand tour with a lady companion, Miss Bartlett. Lucy meets…

“American Beauty” is a comedy because we laugh at the absurdity of the hero’s problems. And a tragedy because we can identify with his failure–not the specific details, but the general outline. The movie is about a man who fears growing older, losing the hope of true love and not being respected by those who…

Soon he’s in America, where an Irish-American judge gets him a place to live, in the basement of an honest cop named Tom O’Meara (Harrison Ford).

The main character is noted lawyer Andre Gobillot, who is his 50s and it seems his life is complete: he has a beautiful wife, respect, money, he reached the top of his profession. But one day everything changes when he accepts a seemingly simple case. Young and attractive woman, Yvette Maudet, is accused of a…

To be honest, it couldn’t go wrong. The darling of musical cinema Irving Berlin plus Bing Crosby, the housewife’s favorite big-eyed boy? A match made in heaven. The big surprise is – it’s even better than it promised to be. This musical is essentially a buddy film. Well sort of, it’s certainly got two buddies…

“Peter Banning” is a busy executive with more time for his cellular phone than for his children, until fate launches him back once again into combat with Captain Hook. Robin Williams plays the harassed businessman, and Maggie Smith is the old granny who’s able to suggest the most wonderful possibilities when she whispers, “Peter, dear –…

There’s a saying in criticism that “depiction does not equal endorsement.” Art should be able to address taboos without necessarily advocating for them, but some surface-level readings miss what the work digs into because it’s not obvious at first glance. In the wake of conservative outrage over an early poster of debut writer/director Maïmouna Doucouré’s…

Often described as “the best Hitchcock movie Hitchcock never made,” Charade stars Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in a sparkling thriller with overtones of screwball romantic comedy — or is it the other way around Directed by Stanley Donen, Charade’s blend of genres allows it to have its cake and eat it too. The thrilleresque double-crosses and reversals…

There is a melancholy gulf over the holidays between those who have someplace to go, and those who do not. “The Apartment” is so affecting partly because of that buried reason: It takes place on the shortest days of the year, when dusk falls swiftly and the streets are cold, when after the office party…

Kate DiCamillo’s Newbery Award-winning novel about a girl who prides herself on being a cynic has been adapted into an unabashedly un-cynical and utterly winning film for families about that most unsung of superpowers: hope. Ten-year-old Flora narrates her own story, and it is clear she would not have it any other way. She likes…

Fern is grieving a life that’s been ripped away from her. It seems like she was relatively happy in Empire, Nevada, one of those many American small towns built around industry. When the gypsum plant there closed, the town of Empire quite literally closed with it. In six months, its entire zip code was eliminated….

A troubled young woman offers to act as a surrogate for a well-off couple in an engrossing new drama which explores moral issues – and maybe even darker themes Well, now, here’s a pretty to-do. Thirtysomething Emily (Sophie Rundle) bumps – literally, with her car – into an 18-year-old girl arguing with a man in…

Thanks to a skillful combination of some sensational African hunting scenes, a musical score of rich suggestion and a vivid performance by Gregory Peck, Twentieth Century-Fox and Darryl F. Zanuck have concocted a handsome and generally absorbing film in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”. Whether it approximates the story Ernest Hemingway wrote (and upon which it…

Adarker, tougher companion piece to El Cid, The Fall of the Roman Empire has always been unfairly overshadowed not only by its more popular predecessor, but also by the fall of its own behind-the-scenes empire. (The mammoth project’s disappointing box office led to the end of Samuel Bronston’s Europe-based super productions.) Both films benefit immensely from the sobriety…

“Lethal Weapon” is a buddy movie about two homicide cops who chase a gang of drug dealers all over Southern California, and the plot makes an amazing amount of sense, considering that the action hardly ever stops for it. The cops are played by Danny Glover, as a homebody who has just celebrated his 50th birthday,…

In “Judas and the Black Messiah,” Daniel Kaluuva gives an electrifying performance that raises the hairs on the back of your neck. As Fred Hampton, the murdered chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, Kaluuya is riveting as he prowls the stage inspiring his audiences. His speeches burn with intensity and conviction. When FBI informant William…

In Sam Pollard’s superb, infuriating documentary, “MLK/FBI,” Andrew Young quotes comedian and activist Dick Gregory: “If you’re Black and not slightly paranoid, you’re sick.” It’s a fitting line for a film about J. Edgar Hoover’s widespread surveillance of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. from 1963 to April 4, 1968. Tapes of these wiretaps and bugs were turned…

Alfred Hitchcock’s “Frenzy” is a return to old forms by the master of suspense, whose newer forms have pleased movie critics but not his public. This is the kind of thriller Hitchcock was making in the 1940s, filled with macabre details, incongruous humor, and the desperation of a man convicted of a crime he didn’t…

This is the first American western Clint Eastwood did after three spaghetti westerns for Sergio Leone in Europe.It’s snappily directed by Ted Post (“Magnum Force”/”Go Tell The Spartans”), who directed Clint in the hit Rawhide TV series. Producer and co-writer Leonard Freeman, with Mel Goldberg, got under Clint’s skin with needless interference and caused Clint…

“After Hours” approaches the notion of pure filmmaking; it’s a nearly flawless example of — itself. It lacks, as nearly as I can determine, a lesson or message, and is content to show the hero facing a series of interlocking challenges to his safety and sanity. It is “The Perils of Pauline” told boldly and…

Here is a gloriously greasy, sweaty, hairy, bloody and violent Western. It is delicious. “For a Few Dollars More,” like all of the grand and corny Westerns Hollywood used to make, is composed of situations and not plots. Plots were dangerous because if a kid went out to get some popcorn he might miss something….

“Bandolero!” is chiefly distinguished by James Stewart’s wry scenes as a phony hangman. But it has another moment or two of interest, mostly thanks to a full gallery of character actors. The story is routine: Stewart runs into a hangman on the trail and learns he’s on the way to hang five men. One of…

Pedro Almodovar’s films are a struggle between real and fake heartbreak–between tragedy and soap opera. They’re usually funny, too, which increases the tension. You don’t know where to position yourself while you’re watching a film like “All About My Mother,” and that’s part of the appeal: Do you take it seriously, like the characters do,…

Although Cecil B. DeMille remains best known for his star-studded Biblical epics throughout the 1930s and 1940s he made a series of similarly grandiose historical adventures exploring significant episodes from America’s past. Following in the wake of The Plainsman (1937), Union Pacific (1939) and Northwest Mounted Police (1940) – which featured the same stars – Unconquered takes place in colonial times only a…

The film is inspired, of course, by the 1950s TV series starring James Garner, who played a cheerful gambler who preferred to charm and con people rather than shoot them, although he was able to handle a sidearm when that seemed absolutely inescapable. Garner is back for the movie version, playing a marshal named Zane Cooper,…

In May 1939, as Europe lurched towards war, amateur excavator/archaeologist Basil Brown, hired to dig up the huge mounds on Edith Pretty’s property in Suffolk, struck gold (literally). First, he came across the skeleton of an 88-foot ship dating to the Anglo-Saxon period. This was the first phase of what Sue Brunning, curator at the…

Michael Cimino’s 1980 film Heaven’s Gate, an extravagantly beautiful mega-Western about a little-known range war in 19th-century Wyoming, has gone down in history not for its beauty but for its extravagance. Treating Heaven’s Gate more like a work in progress than a historic artifact, Cimino has substantially changed the original look of the film, using a digital color…

The film “La Haine” tells the story of three young men–an Arab, an African and a Jew–who spend an aimless day in a sterile Paris suburb, as social turmoil swirls around them and they eventually get into a confrontation with the police. If France is the man falling off the building, they are the sidewalk….

    There is a cry of alarm, some muffled French, a coming and going in the corridor. Hercule Poirot, Adjusting the devices that keep his hair slicked down and his mustache curled up, pauses for a moment in his train compartment. He lifts an eyebrow. He looks out into the hallway. He shrugs. The…

Robert Mitchum had a great walk, a great look, a great voice. He was cool, the epitome and embodiment of cool. But there’s more to Mitchum than his (exceedingly cool) natural attributes. His acting comprises a set of physical techniques that are carefully and precisely performed. About 30 minutes into the incredible Thunder Road – a true cult…

There’s an old saying that “distance makes the heart grow fonder.” I assume the person who coined this phrase had never been in a long distance relationship or was trying to get out of one. Because as Ekwa Msangi’s “Farewell Amor” shows, there’s a lot lost in that distance, like shared histories and mutual understandings. Intimacy…

Director Regina King’s memorably electric “One Night in Miami” (based on the 2013 stage play of the same name by Kemp Powers, who adapted his work for the screen and is the co-writer and co-director of Pixar’s “Soul”) is based on the real-life convergence of Cassius Clay (who would soon become known to the world…

Sofia Villani Scicolone first strolled into the movies via a 1950 beauty pageant. She was 15 years old. Re-named “Sophia Loren” by her husband Carlo Ponti, she got attention immediately, for her beauty, but also for her talent. She was a glamorous woman who played decidedly unglamorous roles, her onscreen personality being earthy, high-tempered, no-nonsense….

“It was a routine death in every sense. It was ordinary. Common. The only remarkable element was Dane. I had married into this situation, but how had he gotten here? Love is not a big-enough word. He stood and faced the reality of death for my sake. He is my friend.”— Matthew Teague “The Friend,” Esquire…

  Is your private voice yours?  Are you sure about that? To help determine this, and whether your private voice is working for or against you, here are a few questions to ask yourself:  What is the general tone of your inner voice?  Harsh, bitter and critical? Or supportive, kind and encouraging? Estimate how much…

Cecil B. DeMille sentimentalizes the American West but still fills the screen with excitement and high adventure as he relates the story of Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok. Of course, DeMille’s version of the story has little to do with the facts, but such incidental details never bothered the great showman, who felt it…