Watching Michael Keaton in “The Founder,” you might not like him, but you “get” him. Meanwhile, the remarkable women depicted in “Hidden Figures” deserve better.
‘Manchester’ captures the drift and flow of daily life and conveys its pungent poetry. Denzel Washington brings August Wilson’s ‘Fences’ to the screen with skill.
“La La Land” pays tribute to, and revives, the glittery, glamoury musicals of the 1940s; “Silence” is a kind of breakthrough for Martin Scorsese: a new quiet.
“Loving” avoids the impersonal feel of most docudramas; it is a movie of soft voices in homely settings. History is made without cinematic exclamation points.
Martin Scorsese talks about apostasy and faith, and how some of the films he’s made (and some he’s influenced by) have taken up these ideas in different ways.
Martin Scorsese talks about the challenges of filing a story set four hundred years ago, the similarities between Endo and Graham Greene, and the idea of vocation.
The director talks about growing up on the Lower East Side, his early dream of making a film about Jesus in New York City, and what led him to Endo’s “Silence.”
The rewards for close attention to every scene and shot in “Moonlight” are the same as those for any patient reading of Henry James serpentine sentences.
“Denial” comes off as preachy, obvious, and severely limited; it gets the basics of the story told, but little more. Even the stronger moments fall strangely flat.
The enduring controversies surrounding Hannah Arendt confirm Wittgenstein’s insight: to think what we are doing was, and remains, much easier said than done.
“Hell or High Water” breathes new life into familiar materials, dealing out anachronistic juxtapositions while de-romanticizing the iconic figures of the western.
Comedies with superficial characters aren’t necessarily bad, but ‘Café Society’ stays predictable. ‘Florence Foster Jenkins,’ however, makes room for pathos.
Two jazz trumpeters, now each the subject of a biopic taking its title from one of its hero’s hits: “Born to Be Blue” (Chet Baker) and “Miles Ahead” (Miles Davis).
The atmosphere of moral agony in Eye in the Sky reflects standard-issue Hollywood sentimentality. Politically, it offers Americans moral justification for drone war.
Barry Crimmins is a funny, frightening man. His humor is so sharp it feels almost dangerous to laugh. There’s no telling when it could turn, or in what direction.
Writer-director László Nemes takes us into the Auschwitz death camp one day in late 1944. The camera immediately fastens on Saul Auslander and never lets go.
Just in time to relieve the post-Oscar doldrums comes the reappearance of Orson Welles’s “Chimes at Midnight,” the 1966 adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays.
Michael Moore tours the social democracies of Europe, assembling a piecemeal progressive utopia and contrasting it with the bleakness on our side of the Atlantic.
Very few historical films have achieved this degree of physical verisimilitude. The bad news? Verisimilitude may be ‘The Revenant’’s only great achievement.
The title of Paolo Sorrentino’s latest doesn’t refer to a fixed stage in life but to the mysterious inner spark—as much spiritual as biological—that keeps us going.
All six movies I watched between Christmas and New Year’s Day were about looking back: to historical eras; to the protagonists’ pasts; or, for us, to our own pasts.
Readers weight in on the debate started by Albert B. Hakim on universal salvation and damnation for the unjust, and fact-check our review of ‘Spotlight.’
“Room” is a work of skill, with an interesting shift that says as much about the differences between literature and cinema as it does about the talents involved.
‘Spotlight’ portrays the Globe’s reporters as heroes, but theirs is a workaday heroism without flourishes or frills. ‘Truth,’ by contrast, is soaked in personality.
To hell with postmodern irony. Here are two earnest movies with straight-arrow heroes: “The Martian,” with Matt Damon, and “Bridge of Spies,” with Tom Hanks.
What’s fairly new about ‘Black Mass’ is that this gangster story focuses more on the moral seduction and destruction of a lawman than on the downfall of a hood.
Set in bombed-out Berlin of 1945, Petzold’s ‘Phoenix’ questions who was guilty, and of what, in the daily workings of the Holocaust—and will there be a reckoning?
In ‘The End of the Tour,’ James Ponsoldt addresses the life—and death—of David Foster Wallace, served as the Platonic ideal for a generation of younger writers.
You won’t see a movie more carefully premeditated than Allen’s latest, which is too much like a machine, its characters more like well-oiled gears than human beings.
The footage once used to exploit the Winehouse miseries have been carefully sequenced by director Asif Karpadia so that they bring her humanity home to the viewer.
Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson is the perfect hero in an epic account of an earthquake that ravages California; Bill Pohlad studies Brian Wilson’s musical perfectionism.
Alex Garland’s “Ex Machina” is a deceptive movie about deceptions, most of all about the very human tendency to deceive oneself in order to feel needed.
Emma Thompson has descried fairy-tale possibilities in the facts of Effie Gray’s story; Kenneth Branagh does moderately well with an expedient “Cinderella.”
