Sherlock, Jr. is Buster Keaton’s masterpiece and one of the greatest silent-era comedies’”a clockwork marvel of visual invention and meta-cinematic reflection. His third feature...
Writing about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), film critic Pauline Kael noted, ‘œIt took nerve, or maybe something more like hubris, for Kubrick to...
A note on this (meta) review: I saw Michael Haneke’s English-language remake of his disturbing masterpiece Funny Games in theaters in the early spring...
Like Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), Jackie Chan’s Police Story (Ging chaat goo si) begins and ends with enormous action sequences. Both films...
If the old truism is right that villains make the most interesting characters, then John Lee Hancock’s The Highwaymen faces a particularly steep challenge...
Harold Lloyd’s penultimate silent feature The Kid Brother finds his much beloved ‘œglasses character’ in the Old West, although everything else about him is...
One of the more fascinating pleasures of mainstream cinema is watching a unique filmmaker working within familiar genre material. Sometimes this intersection of commercial...
In the decade following the release of Taken (2008), which established Liam Neeson as a surprisingly effective action hero of the immensely brooding variety,...
Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of Thomas Mann’s celebrated 1911 novella Death in Venice is visually beautiful and emotionally and thematically hollow. While the film should...
Dan Gilroy’s Velvet Buzzsaw is one-half an amusing, if overly obvious satire of art world pretension and viciousness and one-half a genuinely terrible would-be...
Roma is Alfonso CuarAn’s deeply autobiographical portrait of an upper-class family in Mexico City in the early 1970s, and despite being gorgeously shot and...
Notorious is the best of Alfred Hitchcock’s espionage thrillers and one the strongest works of his extensive cinematic career. In his book Hitchcock’s Films...
Green Book is a warm-hearted, old-fashioned cinematic appeal to our better sensibilities, something that is roundly lacking in the Trump Era of vitriol and...
There is a tendency to think of 1980s cinema as a particularly vacuous period in which hyped high-concept blockbusters completely took over, obliterating the...
Christopher McQuarrie’s Mission: Impossible’”Fallout is a great, unapologetic nose-dive into old-school, free-fall, red-meat action that plays as a stark reminder of why physical presence...
Orson Welles’s second feature film, The Magnificent Ambersons, is one of Hollywood’s great tragedies both on-screen and off. Based on Booth Tarkington’s novel about...
Actor Jonah Hill’s feature writing/directing debut mid90s does one thing very well: It makes good on its title, evoking with anthropological detail the very...
22 July, which dramatizes the 2011 Norway massacre by far-right extremist Anders Breivik, is the latest entry in Paul Greengrass’s cinematic chronicling of modern...
First Man, director Damien Chazelle’s first feature since winning the Best Director Oscar for his exuberant, bittersweet musical La La Land (2016), is a...
Early in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 11/9, a sequel of sorts to his Palm d’Or-winning documentary-polemic Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), he includes footage of his unlikely...
Let’s just start with the numbers. During his more-than-five-decade career as a rare multi-hyphenate writer/producer/director, Larry Cohen has directed 21 feature films, 17 of...
Jabberwocky was Terry Gilliam’s transition film’”his first solo directorial effort outside his role in the British comedy troupe Monty Python, with whom he had...
What I admire most about Michael Moore’s polarizing documentary Bowling for Columbine is that is does not attempt to supply easy answers’”or really any...
Before seeing Jonathan Berman’s Calling All Earthlings, most people’”myself included’”will probably know little or nothing about its subject, which is the best thing it...
Christopher McQuarrie’s Mission: Impossible’”Fallout is a great, unapologetic nose-dive into old-school, free-fall, red-meat action that plays as a stark reminder of why physical presence...
John Schlesinger’s Oscar-winning Midnight Cowboy is many things: an astute character study, a buddy picture, a human comedy, a stark drama, and an honest...
Eugene Jarecki’s intriguing new film The King is a state-of-the-union assessment by way of an Elvis Presley documentary. Infinitely more interested in the American...
Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco is a good’”not great’”film, although it does have one undeniably great sequence. When the film is mentioned, the first thing...
When talking about American independent cinema, there is before Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape and after. Debuting at the Sundance Film Festival in...
Like its predecessor Ant-Man (2015), Ant-Man and the Wasp benefits substantially from its relatively low stakes. Both movies emerged in the shadow of a...
Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukällan) takes place at a historical crossroads between the decline of pagan worship and the spread of Christianity in...
As gentle, reassuring, unprepossessing, and genuinely heartfelt as its subject, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, Morgan Neville’s documentary about the late Fred Rogers and...
Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman is the best superhero movie since Sam Raimi’s first two entries in the Spider-Man franchise (2002, 2004) and Christopher Nolan’s...
The Netflix mystery movie “Handsome” begins by removing any possibility of mystery: Stephen Weber emerges from a swimming pool and announces, “Hello, I’m Stephen...
In various ways, “Risk,” Laura Poitras’ intimate look at Julian Assange and the world of Wikileaks, serves as a companion piece to “Citizenfour,” her...
The first thing that really hits you about “The Lovers” is not its muted color palette, ever-evocative of a smog-suffused Southern California dusk, but...
