In Columbus, architecture takes the place of emotions, to sometimes startling effect. An outwardly chilly, resolutely static film that nevertheless finds poignancy in the most surprising places, Kogonada’s directorial debut does a couple of important things so well that I can’t help but forgive the things it doesn’t. (Kogonada, by …
Let my people go… ape? The “Planet of the Apes” films have always been about surprises. With a title that sounded like Samuel Z. Arkoff-level schlock, the first “Apes” picture from 1968 threw audiences for a curve as a richer-than-expected parable on racial prejudice. Then, that shocking moment — shirtless …
Errol Morris’s quietly passionate and inspiring new film, “The B-Side,” which opens Friday, is a work of echoes and reflections. It’s a documentary portrait of Elsa Dorfman, a photographer who does mainly portraits and whose photography is inseparable from the details of her daily life. Her life and work illuminate …
Perhaps Wonder Woman’s greatest superpower is enduring for the past 75 years as a wildly unstable signifier. Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman, starring Gal Gadot in the title role, further adds to this complicated, contradictory cluster of signs and symbols. Forged from deeply feminist sympathies, the character debuted in All Star …
Though festival tiredness (and madness) may be partly to blame, I’m going to give most of the credit for my weepy Friday morning to Okja, the new film from South Korean director Bong Joon-ho which premieres Friday at the Cannes Film Festival. A rollicking rescue movie with deep ache and …
Once the guns start blazing in Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire, they don’t really stop. Prolific British director Ben Wheatley’s massively entertaining recovery from the messy J.G. Ballard adaptation High-Rise is a more controlled form of chaos, a chamber piece in which no chamber stays empty for long. Almost exclusively set …
One of the quiet triumphs of James Gray's The Lost City of Z is how it posits artillery officer, archaeologist, and explorer Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam)—who disappeared along with his son, Jack (Tom Holland), in 1925 while searching for a fabled civilization in the Amazon rainforest—as a kindred spirit of …
Lee Grant, actress, director and trailblazer for nearly 70 years, remembers her breakthrough. It was 1949, and she was offered a Broadway role as the pretty ingenue lead in a naturalistic cop drama, “Detective Story.” As she sits in her kitchen in Manhattan, Grant recalls her response to the chance …
Each new film that Terrence Malick, the once notoriously unhurried director, has made in the rash of projects since The Tree of Life (2011) evinces a further regression, an increasingly witless sacralizing of male-female coupledom. The title of Malick’s latest, Song to Song, set in Austin against the backdrop of …
In theory, Fifty Shades Darker is great no matter how bad it is. To call it a lousy movie is missing the point: It’s a functional movie, a girls-night-out commando mission whose job is to get in, get out, and get the job done in between. And depending on what …