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...
The movie Munich is well-written (based on Robert Harris's bestselling 2017 thriller), lavishly produced (by Netflix), fast-paced—and an absolute historical travesty. Ever since the 1980s, Harris has...
In 1996, a wonderfully clever take on horror movies began with a dazzling sequence. A high school kid played by Drew Barrymore answers the phone in her empty house. A flirty caller asks her if she...
The new movie Licorice Pizza isn't autobiographical; it's set in 1973, when its writer-director, Paul Thomas Anderson, was three years old. But it feels lived-in, familiar, as though it's full of stories...
In 1999, The Matrix caused a sensation in large measure because it had some of the best fighting sequences ever filmed—scenes that featured a remarkable understanding of how to frame, stage, and film...
There are two kinds of people in the world. First, there are the ones who think Cate Blanchett is the greatest actress of her time, capable of anything—not only winning an Oscar for playing Katharine...
Spider-Man: No Way Home isn't going to save moviegoing, because I'm not sure anything can, but it sure makes one hell of an effort. After the horrendous misfire that was Eternals, Marvel has not only...
House Democrats from red states railed against leadership for including a provision in President Joe Biden's social spending bill that cuts funding for low-income hospitals—then they voted for it.
Twenty...
Before I begin to pile on the superlatives about Steven Spielberg's new version of West Side Story—and oh, yes, there will be superlatives, many, many superlatives—let me talk to you about the 1961...
Jussie Smollett, a professional actor of middling renown, was convicted Thursday on multiple counts of disorderly conduct for staging a hate crime against himself in January 2019. A Chicago jury deliberated...
They used to make movies like House of Gucci every year, like clockwork, back in the day—glossy melodramas about rich and powerful people behaving badly and having lots of sex. Usually they were thinly...
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