Ruben Ostlund’s The Square presents itself as a satire of the age — perhaps the satire of our age since it addresses the incivility that is now inescapable after the 2016 election. Cool indifference...
Hollywood movies are made by some of the worst people in the world, a fact that all parties in the Harvey Weinstein scandal have now made clear. To understand who they are and the banality of their disreputable...
The highly stylized 1982 science-fiction film Blade Runner was probably an influence on 2046, Wong Kar-wai’s wondrous, poetic art-movie investigation into a science-fiction writer’s romantic...
Tom Cruise’s southern accent as pilot and smuggler Barry Seal in American Made twangs with good-old-boy warmth when he asks a bribing CIA agent, “This is my bag [of cash]? This my plane? This...
Battle of the Sexes is unconcerned with equity in life, sports, or art. This overlong, half-comic rewriting of the history of the 1973 tennis stunt between Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell) and Billie Jean King...
After destroying the prelapsarian world in Noah, indie director Darren Aronofsky has returned to his formula. In his sensationalized allegory Mother! Aronofsky sends a nameless woman (Jennifer Lawrence)...
A favorite David Mamet line obliterates the “sure-fire” entertainment offered by the new film adaptation of Stephen King’s It. In the 2000 movie State and Main, the always edgy-yet-conservative...
Fist Fight was released last February just after the “Punch a Nazi” meme went viral, but now the movie is back; its home-video release tying in with the Left’s lenience toward Antifa...
Critics used to dismiss socially conscious movies as well-meaning but unartistic (as when deriding director Stanley Kramer’s entire career for his concern with outdated issues such as brotherhood...
The Oscar-nominated Somali immigrant Barkhad Abdi brought a non-professional’s awkward conviction to his modern-day Somali pirate line “I’m the captain now” in Tom Hanks’s...
‘God save us from white liberals,” a black TV news anchor told me as we exited a press screening of Cry Freedom, the 1987 biopic about the late South African activist Stephen Biko. I repeated...
Charlize Theron and Marion Cotillard outstrip Meryl Streep’s political grandstanding through their all-out physical embodiment of the moment’s anxieties and silliness. This week, both actresses...
Winston Churchill’s 1940 “We Shall Fight on the Beaches” speech is paraphrased in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, but after watching nearly two hours of uninspiring mayhem, it rings...
Part of the mess that Barack Obama left in the wake of his two presidential terms is the utter confusion that has descended upon black Americans who still feel stressed despite the media-promoted privilege...
The Marvel reboot Spider-Man: Homecoming is such a blatantly calculated example of pop-culture inoculation — it presents a teenage Peter Parker’s apprenticeship to the Avengers clan of superhero...
It’s baffling how often moviegoers who consider themselves politically savvy fall for assaults on their principles when the offense is disguised as “entertainment.” This week’s...
Lots of movies are manipulative, but Edgar Wright’s action-comedy Baby Driver defines the era by pampering its teenage audience. Yet its most impressive moment invokes an obscure but cinematic icon:...
Before praising Maudie, the lovely bio-pic featuring an amazing characterization by Sally Hawkins as Canadian painter Maudie Lewis, some commentary on the pertinence of movies and moral responsibility...
Tom Cruise is a product of the ’80s, the period when American movies gave up that mesmerizing 1970s spirit of self-examination and became fatally “high-concept.” Cruise’s recent...
Is Diana of Themyscira, the super Amazon heroine played by Gal Gadot in Wonder Woman, a character or an icon? The Wonder Woman movie, part of the Zack Snyder DC Comics universe magnificently dramatized...
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