The central character is a car named “Christine.” It’s a bright red 1958 Plymouth Fury, one of those cars that used to sponsor the Lawrence Welk Show, with tail fins that were ripped off for the “Jaws” ad campaign. This car should have been recalled, all right: to hell. It kills one guy and maims…

Black Robe” tells the story of the first contacts between the Huron Indians of Quebec and the Jesuit missionaries from France who came to convert them to Catholicism, and ended up delivering them into the hands of their enemies. Those first brave Jesuit priests did not realize, in the mid-17th century, that they were pawns…

Matt Reeves’ “The Batman” isn’t a superhero movie. Not really. All the trappings are there: the Batmobile, the rugged suit, the gadgets courtesy of trusty butler Alfred. And of course, at the center, is the Caped Crusader himself: brooding, tormented, seeking his own brand of nighttime justice in a Gotham City that’s spiraling into squalor…

Bill Nighy is a fun, uninhibited actor, but there’s an abashed, melancholy quality to him that hasn’t been fully explored until “Living,” a drama about a senior citizen reckoning with his life.  Nighy became an unlikely star playing a dissolute, clownish old rocker in “Love, Actually,” and he’s been aces in a series of character parts and second…

June is a master multitasker, a wizard of the World Wide Web. It’s like watching Lydia Tár conduct the Berlin Philharmonic, only with FaceTime and Venmo and Spotify. Even before her widowed mom, Grace (a lovely Nia Long), takes off on a Colombian vacation with her new boyfriend, Kevin (Ken Leung), we learn so much about…

In Detective Chief Inspector John Luther, a renegade copper investigating London’s grisliest homicides, Elba has established an enduring hero, whose characteristic shades of gray—from his long wool overcoat to his moral compass—feel at once classical and tailored to fit. Squinting and shambling through horrific crime scenes with his hands in his pockets, Luther was styled…

Throughout the film written and directed by Todd Field, its title character, a person of exceptionally sensitive hearing and possibly perfect pitch, is almost constantly distracted from her vital activities by extraneous noise. The noises include a doorbell, or something like a doorbell, dinging—our title character, Lydia Tár, almost absently reproduces its two notes on her…

In Marc Forster’s genial, earnest yet unremarkable dramedy “A Man Called Otto,” the titular character Otto can’t pick his daily battles even if his life depended on it. Living in an unfussy suburban neighborhood of identical row houses somewhere in the Midwest, the aging man gets easily annoyed by every little misstep of a stranger. And…

Filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve is a master chronicler of the everyday internal strife many of us can identify with but perhaps aren’t keen to discuss. In “Bergman Island,” there’s a sense of professional tension between a couple driving the plot. In “Goodbye, First Love,” the pangs and aches of young romance have a far-reaching effect on adulthood. In…

In “Dog Gone,” Rob Lowe plays a businessman who joins his son to search the Appalachian Trail for a lost dog. At one point, he describes his expertise as making “predictive assumptions.” It does not take much expertise to make the predictive assumption that this movie, a heartwarming fact-based story of John Marshall and his son, Fielding (Johnny Berchtold)…

Ruben Östlund’s “Triangle of Sadness” has become one of the more divisive Palme d’Or winners in years. On one side, there are those who think its underlined themes and obvious targets are a bit unrefined and obvious. On the other, there are people who would argue those targets deserve a skewering and the writer/director of…

In following up his 2019 smash hit “Knives Out,” the writer/director has expanded his storytelling scope in every way. Everything is bigger, flashier, and twistier. The running time is longer, as is the time frame the narrative covers. But that doesn’t necessarily make “Glass Onion” better. A wildly entertaining beginning gives way to a saggy…

It begins with a beautiful overhead shot of the title Irish island, all green below a clear blue sky (in this picture it only rains at night, which, considering actual weather patterns in Ireland, places the film in yet another genre, that of fantasy). The Carter Burwell score evokes idyllic times, and we see life is rather…

The story opens in Italy with Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) meeting with Archbishop Gilday (Donal Donnelly) to discuss his contribution of $600 million to the Vatican, followed immediately by the after-party. Instead of dragging its feet, “The Godfather Coda” opens with Corleone doing business to legitimize his family and reputation. And then it dives into…

“The Pale Blue Eye,” written and directed by Scott Cooper and starring his frequent collaborator Christian Bale, set in New York’s more-rugged-than-today Hudson Valley in 1830, is thoroughly suffused with bleak mid-winterness. Masanobu Takayanagi’s cinematography sometimes reproduces a gorgeous kind of grayscale, broken up by flashes of blue water and the blue uniforms of the cadets of the West…

In “Armageddon Time,” people keep trying to wake up 11-year-old Paul Graff (a sensitive performance by Michael Banks Repeta). Paul is a slight, dreamy sixth grader in 1980 Queens, New York. Over the span of two months, from the first day of school until the family watches the returns of the Presidential election in November, we repeatedly see…

Director Mark Mylod satirizes a very specific kind of elitism here with his wildly over-the-top depiction of the gourmet food world. This is a place where macho tech bros, snobby culture journalists, washed-up celebrities, and self-professed foodies are all deluded enough to believe they’re as knowledgeable as the master chef himself. Watching them preen and try to…

Think of “Ticket to Paradise” like a postcard of beautiful people having fun in a beautiful place and you’ll get along just fine. Giving it much more thought than that won’t help this rom-com vehicle for George Clooney and Julia Roberts, although the “com” part proves a trifle deficient in a movie that’s significantly better when…

It’s 2011 in a suburb outside of the city of Damascus, Syria. Two sisters are playing in the middle of an idyllic pool scene. People of all ages splash around them or dive below the water’s aqua surface. The sun is out, there’s pop music in the background. Surrounded by mountains and the occasional sprinkling…

“We are nothing without stories, and so we invite you to believe in this one.” Sebastian Lelio’s fascinating “The Wonder” opens with a prologue that includes this line, one that’s crucial to unpacking the film that follows. Lelio doesn’t just want you to passively watch the story of what’s to come. It’s not an invitation…

“The Crown” is a near-flawless prestige drama series. Part of the series’ magic is its ability to craft a sense of urgency; it was the first time the audience visualized intense crises—like the aftermath of King Edward VIII’s abdication, the relationship between Princess Margaret and Group Captain Peter Townsend, the discovery of the Marburg Files—from the…

Oriol Paulo’s seventh feature film is based on the eponymous novel by Torcuato Luca de Tena. The book was written in 1979, a time when lunatic asylums still existed in Spain (as well as in much of Europe). It was not unusual for greedy families to lock up perfectly sane relatives in in order to…

It’s August 1968. Joy (Elizabeth Banks) accompanies her lawyer husband Will (Chris Messina) to a swanky partner’s dinner and is drawn outside by the sounds of a violent protest. Joy hovers behind a line of policemen, in a stand-off with the yippies, all of whom scream in unison, “The whole world is watching!” Joy, protected…

That old bad boy, Humphrey Bogart, is working our side of the street in Twentieth Century-Fox’ and Richard Brooks’ “Deadline, U. S. A.” In this entangled melodrama, which came to the Roxy yesterday, the old tough is breathing fire and brimstone, as he has often done before, and the virulence of his aggression is bringing…

Dwight “The General” Manfredi (Sylvester Stallone) has spent the last 25 years in prison, taking the fall for his friends in the New York mafia. He ain’t no snitch; he’s good at keeping his mouth shut, working out, and brushing up on his reading (Faust, Shakespeare, The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene) while he waits to…

“The Noel Diary.” The yearning of adoptees, the tug of interracial connections and the repercussions of a family tragedy should ring a welcome bell for fans of NBC’s wonderfully weepy melodrama. In the movie, Hartley plays Jake Turner, a best-selling author who returns to his estranged mother’s home in Connecticut after her death. He learns…

The movie begins with some texts evoking the colonization of what was in the late 19th century called the Belgian Congo, and of a nefarious scheme involving mercenaries, slave labor, and pilfered diamonds, all engineered by an envoy named Leon Rom. This fellow is played by Christoph Waltz and he carries with him a rosary that sometimes doubles…

Royalty and the pedestal-prison of womanhood is the theme of this new film from Austrian director Marie Kreutzer, imagining the home life of the Hapsburg Empress Elizabeth of Austria in 1877, the year of her 40th birthday. Like Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and Pablo Larraín’s Princess Diana, the kaiserin lives in a luxurious delirium of loneliness: notionally cherished, actually patronised. The movie…

Enola Holmes (Millie Bobby Brown), the younger sister of Sherlock Holmes (Henry Cavill), returns in this cheeky, breezy sequel that’s better than the original. The character has a better sense of who she is, and the movie spends less time on explaining, more time on action. The mystery at its center is inspired by a real-life…

This movie, directed by Jon Cassar from a script by Brad Mirman, is a Western, and while it won’t quite do to call it an “old-fashioned” Western, one of its pleasures is its straightforwardness. It has a solid story to tell, and tells it with no winks and few, if any, frills. It’s involving and ultimately…

From the moment Gina Prince-Bythewood became a director, her strength has always resided in her commitment to love stories. In her films, sumptuous twilight passions happen on a basketball court, they occur between generations, on the ladder rungs of show business, and between immortals. They center Black women carrying power and interiority, while finding strength within themselves,…

Shanann Watts lived a very online life. She posted videos of her beautiful family online with such regularity that one can get a sense of who she was as a person through the footage that’s publicly available through social media services. Realizing how much of Watts’ personality was right there online must have been the spark…

From its very opening shots “A Jazzman’s Blues” shows that Perry has developed a genuine fluency as a filmmaker. The story’s setup is a frame, something right out of John Grisham maybe: sometime in the not-too-distant past, a Black woman watches a political pitch on television from the current Attorney General of Hopewell, Georgia, disdaining his racist…

History is written by the victors, who are only concerned with covering their asses and mythologizing their glory. This is why the oral histories that have been passed down from generation to generation by African-American families remain so important. Black history is American history, but so often it has been corrupted, miscategorized, bowdlerized, or flat-out ignored in…

Amy Loughren (Chastain) is a nurse at an average New Jersey hospital, trying to balance being a single mother with her high-stress job. This gets even harder when she’s diagnosed with a cardiac condition that could kill her if she doesn’t get a heart transplant in time. She keeps the diagnosis from her bosses, staying…

This film, directed by Edward Berger from a script he wrote with Lesley Paterson and Ian Stokell, is the first German-made version of Erich Maria Remarque’s famed novel about World War I, written in German and published in 1928. The first film adaptation of the book, released in 1930, was American, directed by Lewis Milestone, and kind of a landmark of…

Barbarians, a German Netflix series dramatizing the famed Battle of the Teutoburg Forest fought between the barbarian tribes and the Roman Empire, was a pretty big, albeit surprising hit for the streaming giant back in 2020. What began as a fairly low-key historical drama did a skillful job of building toward a big conclusion, and by the time the…

The series, fictionalized but grounded in real events, tells the story of Pablo Escobar and other drug traffickers in Colombia as they discovered, beginning in the 1970s, that a lot of money could be made by hooking people, especially wealthy Americans, on the drug. We see it unfold partly through the eyes of Steve Murphy,…

“Breaking Bad” was always a show about consequences. More than arguably any other drama, decisions had repercussions and slates weren’t wiped clean between episodes. We followed the arc of Walter White (Bryan Cranston) and Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) from that first day in the desert in the series premiere to the blood-soaked finale, and it…

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is likely to prove divisive, not least depending on whether you watch it on a big TV or squint at its splendour on a phone or laptop. It is so rich and gorgeous that it is easy to spend the first episode simply gawping at the…

Vince Gilligan famously set out to take Walter White “from Mr. Chips to Scarface,” and he did just that. Yet much of what made “Breaking Bad” great had less to do with gradual transformation and more to do with who Walter White was all along. As brought to life by Bryan Cranston, Walter’s insatiable need for…

It all begins with the close-up of a swoony smooch between two young women, so lucidly into each other that the camera refuses to see anything other than their passion. Sensual, alive and refreshingly immodest, this thirsty kiss almost serves as a pledge by director Halina Reijn on what kind of a movie her riotously entertaining “Bodies…

These days, for a good number of notable directors, six years between films isn’t necessarily an unconscionably long time. So why, you may wonder, has there been so much excited anticipation about “Dead for a Dollar,” the first feature in six years from the protean action director Walter Hill? Well, for one thing, he turned 80…

Park Chan-wook doesn’t make films that feel as traditional as the first hour of “Decision to Leave.” Anyone who knows that this is a movie from the director of “Oldboy” and “The Handmaiden” will be looking closely at the relatively straightforward thriller in front of them and trying to figure how it’s going to turn chaotic….

“Bullet Train” is an action film that could easily have been an animated movie, and often looks and feels like one. The story takes place on a bullet train careening across Japan, but most of the movie was shot on green-screened sets, and the cityscapes and countrysides that the train rides through are mainly miniatures and CGI….

George MacKay of “1917” plays Toby, a young graffiti artist who has the unique M.O. of not painting his art in public for everyone to see but in the private homes of the wealthy and powerful. With his buddy Jay (Percelle Ascott), Toby breaks into expensive homes and tags a wall with the phrase “I Came…

Henry Lawson’s 1892 short story The Drover’s Wife is a core Australian text, the tale of a woman living in a remote rural cabin in the outback of the late 19th century. Her husband is away for months at a time, driving livestock, and when a snake approaches her cabin, she protects her children. For generations, it exemplified…

Obsession is a recurring theme for Alfred Hitchcock. In many of his films, ordinary people often get tangled up in crime or some sort of horrific incident because of something they pursue that’s just out of their grasp. In other films, people are victim to others’ desires, caught in a web of someone else’s making….

“A foul-mouthed, angry funny guy with the capacity for kindness loses his wife to cancer, much too young; He processes his grief and waits for a reason to live with the help of his family and friends, all of whom are at close to their wit’s end. Think Ricky Gervais, but so sad.” That’s “After Life.”…

When tragedy compels Tom and Mary Harper to leave their home in Land’s End on England’s southwestern coast, they run as far away as they can, settling in John O’Groats, Scotland. There the couple live in marital harmony, tenderly caring for one another. Decades later, Mary’s sudden death sends Tom on a pilgrimage to put…