In a year when filmmakers Nicolas Pesce (Piercing) and Richard Shepard (The Perfection) have offered their own entertaining takes on the lurid Brian De Palma-style thriller, Read More

The main characters of Olivia Wilde’s highly entertaining feature directorial debut Booksmart are high school outcasts, awkward nerds who’ve spent their entire time in school focused Read More

For most dog movies, one tragic canine death is more than enough to tug on the audience’s heartstrings, but 2017’s A Dog’s Purpose crammed in four Read More

At two different screenings I attended at this year’s 10th annual TCM Classic Film Festival, the person introducing the film stopped to note that their explanation Read More

Fourteen-year-old Black-ish star Marsai Martin is the mastermind behind high-concept comedy Little, having first pitched the idea to Black-ish creator Kenya Barris when she was just Read More

Rock star Becky Something (Elisabeth Moss) is self-destructing even before Her Smell begins. Alex Ross Perry’s rock and roll epic opens with Becky’s band Something She Read More

The movies from animation studio Laika have never been big hits, but they’ve always been thoughtful and quirky and entirely distinctive from the sometimes overly similar Read More

Of all the animated classics that Disney has adapted into live-action (or at least photo-realistic) features, 1941’s Dumbo offers probably the loosest framework for a modern Read More

As the tapestry of the Marvel Cinematic Universe expands further and further, it has become increasingly difficult for individual films to carve out distinctive identities and Read More

The world of the first How to Train Your Dragon movie was exactly as fleshed-out as it needed to be to tell its simple story of Read More

Nobody expected The Lego Movie to be anything more than a feature-length toy commercial, so when Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s 2014 animated film turned out Read More

The story of the early black metal scene in Norway is as much about violence and criminal activity as it is about music, and director and Read More

An aspiring serial killer meticulously plots his first premeditated murder, making detailed notes and plans for the killing and dismemberment of a prostitute, and yet when Read More

The 2011 French inspirational drama The Intouchables, based loosely on the real-life story of wealthy quadriplegic businessman Philippe Pozzo di Borgo and his caregiver, was an Read More

As a pair of dispassionate musicologists and a government official conduct American Idol-style auditions among peasants in 1949 Poland, the vibrant and slightly devious young singer Read More

Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda’s films often focus on the beauty of unexpected or unconventional families, and his latest, Shoplifters (which won the Palme d’Or, the top Read More

When Ryan Coogler’s Creed debuted in 2015, it had the advantage of not coming off as just another Rocky sequel or a cynical exercise in branding. Read More

Director and co-writer Sean Anders based Instant Family on his personal experiences of fostering and later adopting a group of siblings, but that doesn’t mean that Read More

The six segments in Joel and Ethan Coen’s omnibus feature The Ballad of Buster Scruggs are each introduced as stories from a dusty old book of Read More

The story of The Nutcracker seems like the kind of thing that Disney would have adapted decades ago, making the new The Nutcracker and the Four Read More