The Korean drama “ Broker ” begins like a noir. A young woman walks slowly in the pouring rain in the middle of the night in Busan, her flimsy hood doing little to keep her dry.
Civil wars over semicolons and heated debate over the word “looms” would not, on the face of it, seem like the stuff of a gripping big-screen movie.
Whitney Houston’s voice was one of a kind and the creative team behind a new big-budget biopic of the singer had no choice but to agree.
Grab a jacket or a blanket before you watch Netflix's engrossing “The Pale Blue Eye.” I don’t care if you’re already in a warm place. You could be on the surface of the sun and still feel chilly watching it.
It's probably not fair, this season especially, to recoil at the remaking of a classic. “A Christmas Carol," for one, has been told and retold countless times, and who among us won't jump at the chance to watch the Muppets or Bill Murray do their version of Dickens.
A winsome young woman marries into the top echelon of royalty, becomes lonely in a passionless marriage, and suffers eating disorders and depression even as she fascinates the outside world. Decades after her untimely death, they’re still making movies and TV shows about her.
“Perhaps the ballyhoo meant nothing,” Kevin Brownlow wrote in his defining history of the silent film era, “The Parade’s Gone By…”
What happens when your home no longer feels like a home? When the rules of your life no longer make sense? When your body is not your own? When your children are not safe and neither are you? Do you look for justice?
Quick, without looking, guess how long it’s been since there’s been a Shrek movie or even a Shrek-adjacent one. Over a decade seems too long for such a popular franchise, right? And yet here we are, 11 years later, welcoming back Antonio Banderas’s swashbuckling feline in “ Puss in Boots: The Last Wish,” which opens in theaters Wednesday.
It is impossible to talk about “Avatar: The Way of Water” without sounding hyperbolic. But James Cameron’s sequel is a truly dazzling cinematic experience that will have you floating on a blockbuster high.
Let’s face it, “Pinocchio” has always been an odd choice for a children’s morality tale.
Of course, lying is wrong. But that’s not the only message the story sends. Even the classic 1940 Disney version — lighter and more kid-friendly than the 1883 Collodi tale — still sends the message that if you’re not “good,” you don’t deserve to be human.
The center of gravity of “The Whale” is obviously the 600-pound man at its center. Look closely, though, and he's the one with a soul as light as a feather.
Olivia Colman plays the manager of a movie theater in Sam Mendes’ new film “ Empire of Light.” It’s a cinema palace in a small town on England’s south coast that is showing its age.
In one of the more effective moments of “Spoiler Alert,” the camera does something unexpected and wise: it leaves the room. At the very moment a dining-table conversation becomes unbearably painful, the viewer is moved outside, where we can only watch the characters in shadows through a window, hearing nothing.
It comes as some relief that Antoine Fuqua's “Emancipation,” starring Will Smith as a runaway slave in Civil War-era Louisiana, is not, at least traditionally speaking, an Oscar movie.
The lovely and magnetic young actor Emma Corrin certainly has a thing for characters who marry unwisely.
We cringed when Corrin’s winsome, affection-starved Diana married Charles in “The Crown,” knowing the heartbreak that lay ahead.
Elegance Bratton is certainly not the first person to turn to the military to fill a hole in his life.
A gentle and mournful spell is cast by Joanna Hogg’s “The Eternal Daughter,” a ghost story where memory is manifested – visited, intruded upon and, finally, made to glow.
The holiday season is upon us and how better to celebrate than watching Santa slip several pool balls into a Christmas stocking, swing them in the air menacingly and see him cave in someone's face?
Nan Goldin, the subject of Laura Poitras’ Venice Film Festival-winning documentary “ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” is a name you probably either know well or not at all.
Is Searcher Clade the most millennial dad in all of animated moviedom? He has that telltale hipster beard. A sensitive voice sorta like Jake Gyllenhaal. And he feeds his kid avocado toast, with an egg on top.
If you don't have children, you will likely walk out of “The Son” shaken and deeply moved. If you do have kids, you may have to be eventually pulled to your feet after collapsing into a fetal ball for several hours.
Like Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel, the heart of Noah Baumbach’s “White Noise” is in the supermarket. There, in the gleaming aisles of neatly arranged cereal boxes and produce, DeLillo found America’s church: an over-lit spectacle of abundance and artificiality.
The business of making original movie sequels is often a thankless job. You can’t just do the same thing again, but you also can’t be too different either. And many watching will have their guard up from the outset, suspicious that it is ultimately just a shameless cash grab.
There must be something about actor Glen Powell that casting directors associate with the heavens.
He’s played astronaut John Glenn in “Hidden Figures,” voiced a NASA official in the animated film "Apollo 10 1⁄2” and has two roles this year as a hotshot Navy aviator.
Those old Hollywood newspaper flicks are great, but today’s journalists don’t run around newsrooms yelling “Get me rewrite!” Nor do they sprint across the room shouting “Stop the presses!” over the click-clack of teletype machines and manual typewriters.
Zombies had a good run. Vampires had their day in the sun. Now, it seems to be cannibals' turn for their bite at the apple.
Luca Guadagnino's “Bones and All” gives them that, and more, in casting Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet as a pair of young cannibals in a 1980s-set road movie that's more tenderly lyrical than most conventional romances.
“What are we eating? A Rolex?”
So quips Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy) in Mark Mylod's “The Menu” as she waits with her date, Tyler (Nicholas Hoult), a devoted foodie who has landed them a reservation at the exclusive restaurant Hawthorne.
An early 20th century weekly comic strip created by Winsor McCay about Little Nemo’s dream world and adventures provides the very loose inspiration for Netflix’s latest big budget spectacle, “Slumberland.”
The devil works in public relations in “ Spirited,” a new spin on “A Christmas Carol” starring Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds. With songs by “The Greatest Showman” duo Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, big ensemble dance numbers choreographed by Chloe Arnold and special effects galore, “Spirited” it is a maximalist affair that spares no expense in its heart-on-sleeve efforts to entertain.
A movie by one of Hollywood's most successful directors that's based on his early life begins, appropriately enough, at a movie theater and ends in a movie back lot.
“The Fabelmans” is clearly a very personal film for Steven Spielberg and it's as much a coming-of-age journey as a form of expensive therapy with John Williams offering lovely mood music.
Made in the wake of tragedy, “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” reverberates with the agony of loss, piercing the usually less consequential superhero realm.
Next time you arrive home with aching, blistered feet after a long day, take heart: It’s not your feet that are the problem. It’s your shoes.
And that comes from the master, the late Salvatore Ferragamo, who pronounces in director Luca Guadagnino’s loving documentary “Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams” that in his entire career, “I have found there are no bad feet.
It is 1862 in a remote Irish village when an English nurse is called in by a local council to observe and investigate a phenomenon in the haunting new film “ The Wonder." There is, she’s told, an 11-year-old girl who has not eaten food in four months and seems to still be healthy.
In the swaggering, maximalist cinema of Alejandro Iñárritu, Iñárritu has, himself, never been all that far off the screen.
Since his blistering debut in “Amores Perros” to his seamless, surrealistic “Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance),” Iñárritu’s showman-like presence has been easy to feel prodding and propelling the picture along in a ravenous hunt for transcendent images and spiritual epiphany.
A pickup truck breaking down on the street turns into a blessing of sorts in “Causeway,” a new, gentle Apple TV+ drama starring Jennifer Lawrence.
After touching the stars with Brad Pitt, filmmaker James Gray has come back to earth to explore his own childhood in “ Armageddon Time. ” Set in the fall of 1980, in Queens, it is a patient and mature work about a very specific time and place when he was anything but — age 11 and starting sixth grade.
In Phyllis Nagy's “Call Jane,” Joy (Elizabeth Banks) is a 1960s housewife married to a defense attorney (Chris Messina) with a teenage daughter (Grace Edwards) and a baby on the way.
Movie titles are always important, but there’s special significance to the title of “The Good Nurse,” based on the horrific serial killings of dozens and possibly hundreds of patients by a night nurse who injected fatal drugs into IV bags.
Just in time for Halloween comes a film that isn't afraid to lean into the darkness, one frame at a time.
In the first five minutes of “Wendell & Wild,” our teen heroine loses her parents in a car accident, her town is economically gutted and she ends up in the back of a prison bus, her legs shackled and her hands cuffed.
Even if, like me, you’ve never been to a Harry Styles concert, it's hardly difficult to comprehend his huge appeal. He’s ... Harry Styles.
Also huge, to his many fans: the very news of Styles starring in a movie.
One of the best films of the year, Margaret Brown's “Descendant” is, strictly speaking, about the discovery of the Clotilda, the last known slave ship.
If one were to rank the most difficult adolescent age, 11 may not be the first but it is certainly up there. It is just a horribly, hilariously awkward moment of still being very much a kid but with an agonizingly heightened awareness of all those teenage things that are just out of reach.
Not long into “Black Adam,” a preteen boy looks up at the muscled hulk of Dwayne Johnson and begs for his help: “We could use a superhero right now.” Speak for yourself, kid.
Do we need another superhero with another convoluted origin story that stretches back thousands of years and fulfills a whacko destiny?
What if, one day, your best friend decided that they didn’t want to be friends anymore? Not because of something that happened like a fight or some offense. You didn’t say something stupid while drunk.
It's often said that the movies that were fun to make never turn out great. Well, George Clooney and Julia Roberts look like they had a grand time making the Bali-set “Ticket to Paradise."
OK, so we knew there was going to be an ending. We just didn’t know there'd be, like, six endings.
Honestly, after a while I stopped keeping count of each time I thought “Halloween Ends,” ballyhooed as the final, no-really-we-mean-it-final installment of the “Halloween” saga that began with John Carpenter’s 1978 classic — or at least for star and producer Jamie Lee Curtis — was finished.
An insomniac detective falls for a beautiful suspect in a suspicious death he’s investigating in “Decision to Leave.” This deceptively simple premise is stretched over two beguiling hours in director Park Chan-wook’s homage to film noir and Alfred Hitchcock.