The British director Ridley Scott has made an American film about the French dictator Napoleon Bonaparte. Reactions to Scott’s Napoleon divide in two ways. First, there is the division between the French...
Oppenheimer is a landmark picture in many ways, not least because it’s a total throwback. We’re talking about a self-conscious middlebrow epic about America, once a subgenre of its own and relatively...
I have a hard-and-fast rule: I don’t see movies in which children are shown to suffer or are in jeopardy. But I’m also 62, and sometimes I forget my own hard-and-fast rules the way I forget words here...
Steven Spielberg directed the first four Indiana Jones movies. He told James Mangold, the director of the just-released fifth installment, that the secret to making such a picture is that it's "a trailer...
Twenty years ago, adult comedies were more reliable performers at the box office than horror movies—or superhero movies, for that matter. Will Ferrell, Adam Sandler, Steve Carell, Seth Rogen, the writer-directors...
In 2018, a cartoon called Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse won the Academy Award for best animated feature—and rarely has any Oscar been as deserved. It was, and is, dazzling. Multiple versions of the...
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...
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