The ideas are aplenty in Vox Lux, as are the choices, very specific choices made by writer-director Brady Corbet and star Natalie Portman. The film – a histrionic take on the poisonous aspects of fame andRead Full Review

The merging of Barry Jenkins and James Baldwin is as serendipitous as it is joyous, a wondrous meeting of historical talents. The Oscar-winning Jenkins could have made anything he wished after his second film, Moonlight tookRead Full Review

Alfonso Cuarón is one of maybe half a dozen filmmakers considered by many to be amongst the best living directors on the planet. He is the foremost figure in the trifecta of major Mexican directors,Read Full Review

Surpassed by its sister company, Pixar Animation, in terms of prestige and trophies, the standard-bearing Walt Disney Animation studio has climbed back into equal footing over the last few years. Starting with 2010’s Tangled and culminatingRead Full Review

What does one make of Green Book? The film has won major prizes from the National Board of Review and at the Toronto Film Festival, but feels like a certified crowd-pleaser straight out of 1967. In thatRead Full Review

Yorgos Lanthimos is always aiming to unsettle. It’s impossible to guard against the ways in which he reflects the horrors of humanity upon the audience, and it speaks to his strength as a storyteller that you needRead Full Review

I’ll admit to confusion when I learned that Steve McQueen – a filmmaker whose choices in projects lean more toward the conceptual and abstract – was going to make Widows, an obvious genre piece. That confusionRead Full Review

Creed II retreads on familiar Rocky mythology in ways that Creed rewrote it. This sequel is an act of simple reconstruction, as opposed to the first film’s deconstruction. Not only do Michael B. Jordan’s Adonis Creed and SylvesterRead Full Review

It’s fascinating to me that a director as distinct as Julian Schnabel always finds himself making biopics, one of cinemas most traditional genres. With At Eternity’s Gate, Schnabel tells the story of Vincent van Gogh, withRead Full Review

The tales within The Ballad of Buster Scruggs are collectively somber, though some certainly more than others. That the film comes from the Coen Brothers will always, on its own, make it more interesting, but toRead Full Review

Winning the Palme D’or at the Cannes Film Festival earlier in 2018 seemed like a crowning moment for internationally-renowned film director Hirokazu Kore-eda. His latest film, Shoplifters, won the top prize at the festival, but unlikeRead Full Review

The protagonist of Boy Erased leads an incredibly normal life. His father runs a Ford dealership in their Arkansas town, while his mother is a hairdresser. He succeeds in high school, plays on the basketball team,Read Full Review

I think one day we will get a documentary about the making Bohemian Rhapsody, a film that took nearly a decade to get made, went through a carousel of leading men and directors, was constantly pushedRead Full Review

I’d imagine that most people who get around to The Other Side of the Wind – which is now available on Netflix – will wonder if this is a mess of a film, only hailed asRead Full Review

The piercing of eyes of Frederick Wiseman take a look at a small town in America’s heartland in Monrovia, Indiana. As usual, Wiseman’s film has no talking heads, no narration, no guiding voice outside of Wiseman’sRead Full Review

Literature is littered with novels about white people betrayed by the post-war society. At a time when the American government was doing more than they ever had to invest in its people, lots of minorities fellRead Full Review

Why is it that we do not appreciate the talent of wonderful comedic performers until they’ve proven themselves of equal measure in dramatic roles? Why is funny seen as cheaper than morose or sentimental? IRead Full Review

The less you know about Burning is probably the better. The film is based on a Haruki Murakami short story, and the adaptation from Lee Chang-dong goes from a complicated love triangle to a boilerplate mysteryRead Full Review

The memoirs of David and Nic Sheff are the source material for the script of Beautiful Boy, a dreamy addiction narrative told from perspective of the addict and the addict’s father simultaneously. Director Felix Von GroeningenRead Full Review

Neil Armstrong is a name so ingrained into American history that it distracts from the fact that he willingly avoided any opportunity to show an ounce of personality or charisma. He was an incredibly private,Read Full Review

Robert Redford has been so famous and so great for so long that any movie that he makes these days is about the mythology of his stardom. The reason David Lowery’s latest film, The Old Man &Read Full Review

There’s a very specific kind of Hollywood epic melodrama that A Star is Born is conjuring, one that used to dominate theaters with its starpower and saccharine plot construction. It is, of course, the fourth versionRead Full Review

The families in Private Life – the first film from Tamara Jenkins since The Savages in 2007 – are disgruntled and argumentative, worn down by the familiarity of partnership. They have their reasons. In the case ofRead Full Review

The three tales in Monsters and Men – the debut feature from up-and-coming filmmaker Reinaldo Marcus Green – weave into each other seamlessly, without mention or pause, without title cards to announce the shift. All threeRead Full Review

The twisting plot of A Simple Favor is meant, I presume, to remind audiences of film noir. The severity of the characters and the fates that they meet certainly meet the criteria. But of course, thisRead Full Review

Whatever movie Lizzie wants to be, I’m not sure it really succeeds. It’s a murder mystery without much mystery, it’s a psychological thriller without an ounce of suspense. The film is based on the true storyRead Full Review

Ethan Hawke’s perseverance in Hollywood is in debt to his talent but also to his passion. The actor has maintained a career over multiple decades, taking on a variety of roles, always imbuing his charactersRead Full Review

The films of Andrew Bujalski have always had a disjointed feeling for me; a certain mellowness which seems too contrasted with the chaos of his characters’ feelings. I do not think this is the caseRead Full Review

In making a film about conceptual art, it would only make sense for the film itself to be conceptual as well. And so, writer-director Josephine Decker delves shockingly deep into the fractured mind of Madeline (aRead Full Review

I’ve never read Meg Wolitzer’s novel, The Wife, but it’s adaptation is one of those films that seems like it’s a much better book. The film stars Glenn Close as Jane Castleman, the supportive wife ofRead Full Review

The kind of romantic comedy that Crazy Rich Asians is attempting to be is something that Hollywood hardly makes anymore. It’s the kind of romance that depends on the audience’s familiarity with the story, its uniquenessRead Full Review

If Spike Lee’s form of provocation seems on-the-nose, it’s only because the world has caught up to his particular vision of our culture. Lee has often been controversial, has been accused of paranoia, charged asRead Full Review

Watching Christopher Robin, Disney’s new take on the Winnie-the-Pooh franchise, I was reminded of Steven Spielberg’s Hook, another film based on a children’s series which asked the audience to imagine a beloved child character as an adult.Read Full Review

To the degree that every Tom Cruise movie is actually, in its core, about Tom Cruise, Mission: Impossible – Fallout is part redemption tale and part swan song, part relinquishment of the throne and part declarationRead Full Review

The creeping, sometimes translucent tentacles of gentrification make their way through the streets of Oakland, California in the new film Blindspotting, which stars original Hamilton cast member Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal – the two actors also wrote the script.Read Full Review

All comparisons to Die Hard aside – and there are many – Skyscraper is an exceptional Hollywood action movie. It stars Dwayne Johnson, or The Rock, who is the America’s only true action movie superstar, an actorRead Full Review

Not many people born in the last thirty years would claim that middle school is anything other than unmitigated torture, a formless purgatory between the mania of elementary and the rage of high school. Eighth Grade,Read Full Review

Three Identical Strangers promises an astonishing true story, and delivers. Three triplets with remarkably similar physical and personality traits manage to find each other in New York when they’re nineteen years old after being separatedRead Full Review

There’s a level of absurdity throughout Sorry To Bother You that is unlike anything I’ve seen in quite a while. It’s themes of racism, classism, labor unrest and art conception are all made to serve the comedyRead Full Review

I guess there was no other place for this movie to go. When Hollywood chose to prop up the Jurassic Park franchise in 2015 with Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World, they chose to make self-referential fun and becameRead Full Review

The films of Debra Granik have a bruised, inky nature to them. Her characters are hurt, occasionally floundering, always paranoid about where the next strike will come from. Her first two features dealt with addiction. DownRead Full Review

If you (like me) are a big movie fan and a huge basketball fan, then you (like me) are probably frustrated by the dearth of good basketball movies. And then maybe you give a movieRead Full Review

I guess that Hereditary is good. Across the board, it seems to be executing its plan as fully and exceptionally as it wants to. It’s lead by a performance by Toni Colette that might be amongstRead Full Review

So, after fourteen years, Incredibles 2 just starts right where it left off. After the heroics against the first film’s villain, Syndrome, they’re met with an impeccably timed attack from The Underminer, a mole-like, hard-hat wearingRead Full Review

I’ve never watched an episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood during its 38-year run on public television. His image and cadence was, in fact, always played for parody when I was younger, nearly always mocked for theRead Full Review

If you, like me, are someone who thinks that the cast of Ocean’s 8 is enough to make a decent movie, then you might be pleased to learn that Ocean’s 8 is more than happy to prove thatRead Full Review

If Solo: A Star Wars Story could rid itself of that subtitle and all of the pop culture baggage that comes along with it, it would be one of the year’s best action films. I’m not totallyRead Full Review

The blending of fact and fiction in The Rider is more interesting in theory than in practice. The film documents the choking death of traditionalist Americana, the fading legacy of the mythological cowboy. The film starsRead Full Review

Few artists are more explicitly tormented than Paul Schrader. The man most famous for writing Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece, Taxi Driver, followed that with an up-and-down, decades-long career examining the spiritually lost and morally bankrupt. Schrader’s moviesRead Full Review

The career of Jason Reitman is an overall successful one, with a filmmaking style that is more competent than unique, and a point of view that only occasionally hits the mark. No one brings theRead Full Review