The new film BlackBerry, a docudrama about the development and the destruction of the titular device, is many things, almost all of them wonderful. It’s a superb portrait of the clash between entrepreneurship...
Boy, is Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant good—a riveting, intense, heart-pounding military thriller that packs more punch than any such movie since The Hurt Locker in 2008. And that’s a huge surprise coming...
One of the funniest American contributions to the tradition of the campus novel is Richard Russo’s Straight Man (1997), which follows the middle-aged English professor William Henry Deveraux Jr. during...
Like many stars of yore, Russell Crowe has reached the age for exploitation movies, as we used to call them. Hollywood as a whole has reached that age, and horror has gradually become the most profitable...
Dwight Frye gave one of the greatest performances in cinema history, and you've never heard of him. It's Frye on screen in the opening minutes of 1931's Dracula, playing the mild-mannered lawyer who has...
John Wick: Chapter 4 opens with an homage to the most famous shot in Lawrence of Arabia, as Laurence Fishburne blows out a match in New York and the movie slam-cuts to a shot of the desert in North Africa....
For much of its running time, Avatar: The Way of Water resembles nothing so much as one of those screensavers from the early 2000s that turned your computer monitor into a simulated aquarium. Remember?...
For decades, in interviews, Steven Spielberg spoke slightingly of his father Arnold. He said his father had never shown him affection, and "I don’t want to repeat that error. I know that I always felt...
Like Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt has appeared to be on the verge of reversing the irreversible rules of time. Three years ago, when he was 55, he looked positively Greek-godlike as he completed a roofing job...
The new movie Vengeance is very intelligent, it goes in unexpected directions, and it sticks with you. The problem is that it strains credulity in a weird way. But it’s still worth seeing.
We begin...
Everybody is rooting for Jordan Peele, the wonderful sketch comedian who unexpectedly became a superstar behind the camera with the release of his sensational horror comedy Get Out in 2017. The movies...
When it’s really on fire, Thor: Love and Thunder is a wondrous work of sustained, exhilarating silliness. Now, it’s not as silly or as exhilarating as its glorious predecessor, Thor: Ragnarok, which...
On one extraordinary February night in 1979, three television networks went to war. It was the Sunday night of sweeps week, when ad rates for the upcoming season were set, and CBS decided to go for the...
So say you’re a movie studio executive desperately looking through your backlog of titles for some "intellectual property" you already own that you can exploit. You discover that you possess the rights...
Michael Crichton was both wildly brilliant and pretty lousy, and never more so than in his 1990 novel Jurassic Park. As a novelist, screenwriter, and director, he was lame, plodding, and formulaic—ever...
There's a scene in the middle of Top Gun: Maverick in which Tom Cruise sits down with Val Kilmer, his adversary from the first Top Gun, released 36 years ago. Kilmer's Iceman was easily the most interesting...
I'm not sure any story in any movie has ever mattered less than the story in Downton Abbey: A New Era. In this, the second feature film to be spun off from the six-season television series, a bunch of...
One day, many years ago, two friends of mine had a conversation about the just-opened Holocaust Museum in Washington. "Oh my God, Jen," said one, "have you been?" Jen replied that she hadn't, but was...
Confession: Though I write about the movies professionally, I avoided seeing the film CODA until a few hours before the Oscar ceremony where it won the top prize—when I finally booted up Apple TV Plus...
The new Batman movie is called The Batman, which is how the character was billed in his first comic-book appearance 83 years ago. But it would be more accurate if they'd called it A Batman—since he's...
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