Nan Goldin, the subject of Laura Poitras’ Venice Film Festival-winning documentary “ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” is a name you probably either know well or not at all.
Is Searcher Clade the most millennial dad in all of animated moviedom? He has that telltale hipster beard. A sensitive voice sorta like Jake Gyllenhaal. And he feeds his kid avocado toast, with an egg on top.
If you don't have children, you will likely walk out of “The Son” shaken and deeply moved. If you do have kids, you may have to be eventually pulled to your feet after collapsing into a fetal ball for several hours.
Like Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel, the heart of Noah Baumbach’s “White Noise” is in the supermarket. There, in the gleaming aisles of neatly arranged cereal boxes and produce, DeLillo found America’s church: an over-lit spectacle of abundance and artificiality.
The business of making original movie sequels is often a thankless job. You can’t just do the same thing again, but you also can’t be too different either. And many watching will have their guard up from the outset, suspicious that it is ultimately just a shameless cash grab.
There must be something about actor Glen Powell that casting directors associate with the heavens.
He’s played astronaut John Glenn in “Hidden Figures,” voiced a NASA official in the animated film "Apollo 10 1⁄2” and has two roles this year as a hotshot Navy aviator.
Those old Hollywood newspaper flicks are great, but today’s journalists don’t run around newsrooms yelling “Get me rewrite!” Nor do they sprint across the room shouting “Stop the presses!” over the click-clack of teletype machines and manual typewriters.
Zombies had a good run. Vampires had their day in the sun. Now, it seems to be cannibals' turn for their bite at the apple.
Luca Guadagnino's “Bones and All” gives them that, and more, in casting Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet as a pair of young cannibals in a 1980s-set road movie that's more tenderly lyrical than most conventional romances.
“What are we eating? A Rolex?”
So quips Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy) in Mark Mylod's “The Menu” as she waits with her date, Tyler (Nicholas Hoult), a devoted foodie who has landed them a reservation at the exclusive restaurant Hawthorne.
An early 20th century weekly comic strip created by Winsor McCay about Little Nemo’s dream world and adventures provides the very loose inspiration for Netflix’s latest big budget spectacle, “Slumberland.”
The devil works in public relations in “ Spirited,” a new spin on “A Christmas Carol” starring Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds. With songs by “The Greatest Showman” duo Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, big ensemble dance numbers choreographed by Chloe Arnold and special effects galore, “Spirited” it is a maximalist affair that spares no expense in its heart-on-sleeve efforts to entertain.
A movie by one of Hollywood's most successful directors that's based on his early life begins, appropriately enough, at a movie theater and ends in a movie back lot.
“The Fabelmans” is clearly a very personal film for Steven Spielberg and it's as much a coming-of-age journey as a form of expensive therapy with John Williams offering lovely mood music.
Made in the wake of tragedy, “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” reverberates with the agony of loss, piercing the usually less consequential superhero realm.
Next time you arrive home with aching, blistered feet after a long day, take heart: It’s not your feet that are the problem. It’s your shoes.
And that comes from the master, the late Salvatore Ferragamo, who pronounces in director Luca Guadagnino’s loving documentary “Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams” that in his entire career, “I have found there are no bad feet.
It is 1862 in a remote Irish village when an English nurse is called in by a local council to observe and investigate a phenomenon in the haunting new film “ The Wonder." There is, she’s told, an 11-year-old girl who has not eaten food in four months and seems to still be healthy.
In the swaggering, maximalist cinema of Alejandro Iñárritu, Iñárritu has, himself, never been all that far off the screen.
Since his blistering debut in “Amores Perros” to his seamless, surrealistic “Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance),” Iñárritu’s showman-like presence has been easy to feel prodding and propelling the picture along in a ravenous hunt for transcendent images and spiritual epiphany.
A pickup truck breaking down on the street turns into a blessing of sorts in “Causeway,” a new, gentle Apple TV+ drama starring Jennifer Lawrence.
After touching the stars with Brad Pitt, filmmaker James Gray has come back to earth to explore his own childhood in “ Armageddon Time. ” Set in the fall of 1980, in Queens, it is a patient and mature work about a very specific time and place when he was anything but — age 11 and starting sixth grade.
In Phyllis Nagy's “Call Jane,” Joy (Elizabeth Banks) is a 1960s housewife married to a defense attorney (Chris Messina) with a teenage daughter (Grace Edwards) and a baby on the way.
Movie titles are always important, but there’s special significance to the title of “The Good Nurse,” based on the horrific serial killings of dozens and possibly hundreds of patients by a night nurse who injected fatal drugs into IV bags.
Just in time for Halloween comes a film that isn't afraid to lean into the darkness, one frame at a time.
In the first five minutes of “Wendell & Wild,” our teen heroine loses her parents in a car accident, her town is economically gutted and she ends up in the back of a prison bus, her legs shackled and her hands cuffed.
Even if, like me, you’ve never been to a Harry Styles concert, it's hardly difficult to comprehend his huge appeal. He’s ... Harry Styles.
Also huge, to his many fans: the very news of Styles starring in a movie.
One of the best films of the year, Margaret Brown's “Descendant” is, strictly speaking, about the discovery of the Clotilda, the last known slave ship.
If one were to rank the most difficult adolescent age, 11 may not be the first but it is certainly up there. It is just a horribly, hilariously awkward moment of still being very much a kid but with an agonizingly heightened awareness of all those teenage things that are just out of reach.
Not long into “Black Adam,” a preteen boy looks up at the muscled hulk of Dwayne Johnson and begs for his help: “We could use a superhero right now.” Speak for yourself, kid.
Do we need another superhero with another convoluted origin story that stretches back thousands of years and fulfills a whacko destiny?
What if, one day, your best friend decided that they didn’t want to be friends anymore? Not because of something that happened like a fight or some offense. You didn’t say something stupid while drunk.
It's often said that the movies that were fun to make never turn out great. Well, George Clooney and Julia Roberts look like they had a grand time making the Bali-set “Ticket to Paradise."
OK, so we knew there was going to be an ending. We just didn’t know there'd be, like, six endings.
Honestly, after a while I stopped keeping count of each time I thought “Halloween Ends,” ballyhooed as the final, no-really-we-mean-it-final installment of the “Halloween” saga that began with John Carpenter’s 1978 classic — or at least for star and producer Jamie Lee Curtis — was finished.
An insomniac detective falls for a beautiful suspect in a suspicious death he’s investigating in “Decision to Leave.” This deceptively simple premise is stretched over two beguiling hours in director Park Chan-wook’s homage to film noir and Alfred Hitchcock.
Almost by default, filmmakers typically take a wide lens to historical moments like the 1955 lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till.
The stars appear one after the other — a banquet of talent, a glut of inventiveness — and yet nothing clicks. Hollywood's most famous squirm in a slog.
Welcome to “Amsterdam,” writer and director David O.
“Time is the thing," says Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) in Todd Fields' “Tár.”
Lydia, a world-renown conductor, is explaining her art as more than waving a baton around — not a mere “human metronome” — but rather an almost god-like ability to mold and contort time.
The question of worth flows through Ruben Östlund’s “ Triangle of Sadness,” a handsomely grotesque satire about the guests and workers aboard a luxury yacht.
The nostalgia for “Hocus Pocus” has always been a bit of a mystery to me.
There is nothing new about kids loving mediocre films and carrying that soft spot into adulthood, but I was in the right demographic when “Hocus Pocus” came out in the summer of 1993 (age 9, approaching third grade) and remember it being just OK.
I have mostly frowny faces for “Smile,” a bluntly unsettling and blandly grim new horror flick that wrings as much mileage as it can out of a twisted grin.
“Bros,” the latest romantic comedy to hit theaters, is absolutely revolutionary. And totally conventional. It's a film where both extremes can be true at the same time.
The revolutionary part comes from it being the first gay rom-com produced and distributed by a major American studio.
Passion projects can go all sorts of wrong ways, but Lena Dunham has made something of a triumph in “ Catherine Called Birdy,” a medieval coming-of-age story that’s part “Bridget Jones’s Diary," part Mel Brooks and all joy.
Somewhere around when TikTok videos were analyzing, with the intensity of the Zapruder film, whether spit flew at the Venice Film Festival premiere of Olivia Wilde's “Don't Worry Darling,” it became clear that the melodrama of the movie's promotional tour had easily eclipsed the movie, itself.
Viola Davis should have been leading armies this whole time.
In “ The Woman King,” the always regal Oscar-winner is a mass of muscle, battle wounds and world weariness as General Nanisca, the head of the Agojie, an all-female unit of warriors who protected the West African Kingdom of Dahomey in the 19th century.
What a dream it must be to be Marilyn Monroe, a starstruck assistant tells her. “Everyone would give their right arm to be you!”
And we cringe, as we'll do many times during Andrew Dominik’s brutal, bruising and often beautiful “Blonde,” starring a heartbreaking Ana de Armas.
Brett Morgen's David Bowie documentary “Moonage Daydream ” plunges into the mind of the rock star — it puts a ray gun to Bowie's head — and comes away with something that, at its best, is a gift of sound and vision.
A murder occurs right as “See How They Run” begins and for a very good reason: It's a whodunit film about a real murder backstage at a whodunit play where all the murders are fake.
“Barbarian” starts at night with a heavy downpour and a thunderclap. So far, so good, for what seems to be a classic horror movie. Hold onto your ponchos.
"Breaking,” Abi Damaris Corbin’s lean and heartfelt first feature, is a lackluster bank-robbery thriller with noble intentions enlivened by an impassioned performance by John Boyega and an elegiac final appearance by the late Michael K.
Sharks, grizzlies, giant snakes and rampaging apes have traditionally been the go-to choices for animal-kingdom antagonists in survival thrillers. Lions not so much. Maybe the king of the jungle has always been too regal, too majestic — too heroic — to be lowered to the status of mere summer-movie marauder.