Category Archives: Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news

There’s a reason the romantic conversations here have a wordy/moonstruck, up-the-romantic-stakes feel, even as the world they’re delivered in feels lived-in and real. Dan Fogelman wrote and directed “Life Itself,” and this trailer plays like his more famous creation, “This … Continue reading →

There’s an implicit covenant between filmmaker and audience, one that Tim Sutton, director of “Dark Night” repeatedly violates. You can make your movie an attention-demanding exercise, invite us into your head by under-explaining, telling your story with tone, mournful music … Continue reading →

This one opens in March of next year. There’s zero conflict or the possibility of conflict in this first teaser, so something’s missing. I mean, I don’t expect “Action Point,” heaven forbid. But…something.

  The short answer to that headline question is “No.” Even on Netflix, director Kelly Reichardt’s movies are the ultimate acquired taste. Austere to the point where tiny gestures are magnified into moments of enormous consequence, silent save for the … Continue reading →

The people who made “The Lobster” have opted for “period piece” for their next trick, a dark comedy about the reign of daft Queen Anne of Great Britain. With Olivia Colman as God Save Me and Rachel Weisz as her … Continue reading →

  All of my leisure reading is taken up with non-fiction, with the odd fiction classic thrown in just to clear the palette (Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Patrick O’Brian). And as I read this history of Dunkirk or that Life of … Continue reading →

The most dramatic and damning story about the heedless run-up to the invasion of Iraq has to be the ways a humiliated and enraged America blundered into Iraq, led by a Bush administration hell-bent on getting a war and an … Continue reading →

Based on the Penelope Fitzgerald novel, directed by the woman who gave us “The Secret Life of Words,” “Elegy” and “Learning to Drive,” “The Bookshop” celebrates reading in the face of ignorance, public good over greed and love. It finally … Continue reading →

  Josh Brolin joins Danny McBride and his “The Foot-Fist-Way” director Jody Hill for another comic riff on emasculated Southern white manhood with “The Legacy of a Whitetail Deer Hunter.” It’s a satiric goof on fathers and sons and the … Continue reading →

The sophomore jinx settles in over “Frank & Lola” director Matthew Ross’s second feature, a violent thriller with a strong undercurrent of sex, Russian intrigues and Keanu Reeves. “Siberia” is tedium itself, a boring, talkative and nonsensical story that parks … Continue reading →