Taylor Sheridan isn’t afraid to embrace genre. His Wind River plays more like an unusually well-made episode of CSI: Wyoming than the highly anticipated directorial effort from the screenwriter of Hell or High Water (which may well have been last year’s best-written film). Set in the desolate, snow-covered Wind River…
There is a better, more touching movie hidden somewhere inside The Only Living Boy in New York, and you can often see it creeping in around the edges. It’s not to be found in the somewhat empty coming-of-age narrative at the film’s center, which follows Thomas (Callum Turner), a precocious,…
I sincerely hope that there’s a five-hour cut of Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit somewhere, a version with cleaner through-lines, deeper characterizations and a more organic narrative. But the version that we have right now — a messy, troubling beast clocking in at around 150 minutes — is riveting in its own…
At 5 p.m. Thursday, I became one of the first people in this country to see The Emoji Movie a second time. (Aside, obviously, from the folks who made it — though I’m not entirely sure that some of them actually bothered to see it all the way through once.)…
It must be nice being Luc Besson, stuck at the age of 14 for the past 44 years. Back when I was that age, in the late 1980s, Besson was among my favorite working filmmakers. I adored the earnest wonder of the deep-sea worlds of The Big Blue (1988) and…
The nerve-racking war thriller Dunkirk is the movie Christopher Nolan’s entire career has been building up to, in ways that even he may not have realized. He’s taken the British Expeditionary Force’s 1940 evacuation from France, early in World War II — a moment of heroism-in-defeat that has become an…
Somehow, while we were worrying about superheroes and star destroyers and hot rods and whether Captain America could beat up Superman or whatever, the goddamned Planet of the Apes movies became the most vital and resonant big-budget film series in the contemporary movie firmament. And they did it with the…
Chasing Coral premieres on Netflix on Friday, July 14. Jeff Orlowski grew up wanting to be a nature photographer. But like so many in that field, his work now focuses less on capturing Earth’s natural wonders than it does on cataloguing their steady demise. “This is an entire field of…
In the run-up to this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Bong Joon-ho’s Okja was one of the most mysterious titles in the Official Competition lineup. Then, after people had seen it, Okja turned out to be … one of the most mysterious titles in the Official Competition lineup. Now that it’s…
Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver is a remorselessly entertaining, impeccably assembled action-musical in which cars and people defy the laws of physics and common sense. They leap into gunfire and hop over hoods and careen down streets in perfect time to the beats of an unimpeachably cool soundtrack. It’s all absurd,…
The pitch for The Big Sick might sound like a tacky weepie you’d have been afraid to watch on TV in the 1990s. But it’s hard to do justice to the balancing act that the creators of this singular comedy have achieved. Based on events in the life of star…
Despite my fondness for Quentin Tarantino, I’ve never been a Reservoir Dogs fan. Back in 1992, the writer-director’s feature debut seemed to me little more than a clever and grotesquely violent one-act play, gussied up with structural whimsy. Yes, the opening scene — black-suited crooks bantering about Madonna and the…
Over the years, Tom Cruise has been many things, but he’s almost never been marginalized — not in one of his own movies. Oh, he’s played supporting parts and done cameos here and there, but even in those smaller roles (in films like Tropic Thunder or Rock of Ages), he…
The 2017 Cannes Film Festival wrapped up last Sunday with a slate of generally predictable (and perfectly worthwhile) awards. And while it may have been a somewhat lackluster year for the festival’s main competition, there were plenty of cinematic treasures to be found on the Croisette – even a couple…
Imagine a remake of Cape Fear shot like Kubrick’s The Shining, with Max Cady recast as a child, and you’ll have some idea of the strangeness of Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer. The film has quickly proved to be one of the most divisive titles at this…
With his bow-legged power-walk, low-boil narcissism and tough-guy snarl, Brad Pitt is the comic ghost in David Michod’s all-too-real War Machine. The film, which is premiering on Netflix this week (and also getting an extremely limited theatrical release), was inspired by the late Michael Hastings’s book The Operators: The Wild…
Solid rule of thumb: Never accept strawberries from strangers on the street, no matter how good-looking the fruit or well-spoken the unknown person. But maybe that’s just me. For Clare (Teresa Palmer), the intrepid Australian backpacker who in Berlin Syndrome finds herself imprisoned in a Berlin apartment by a romantic…
In the run-up to this year’s festival, Bong Joon-ho’s Okja was one of the most mysterious titles in the Official Selection lineup. Now that people have seen it, Okja has turned out to be…one of the most mysterious titles in the Official Selection lineup. What is it, exactly? A children’s…
Last year’s Cannes Festival seemed to be all about the past, trauma, and the persistence of memory. It’s too early in this year’s festival to suss out any broad themes, but the one-two punch of Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck and Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless, the first two Official Competition titles to screen,…
It might be surprising to realize that David Lynch has only ever made one period piece: The Elephant Man (1980), set in the Victorian era. The rest of the director’s films, save for his 1984 sci-fi disaster Dune, take place in what presumably is the here and now. Or, more…
Michael Mann’s 1995 masterpiece, Heat, comes out this week in a brand-new, fully loaded and beautiful Blu-ray edition. To explore further what makes this epochal crime drama so special, I recently talked to the director. The story of Heat was based on real-life personalities. There was real thief named Neil…
If nothing else, Alien: Covenant is the most ambitious Alien film ever made. It’s almost as if Ridley Scott, foiled in his recent attempts at biblical epics, metaphysical dramas and thorny psychosexual thrillers, decided to revisit those genres under cover of a prized franchise sequel. That’s not to suggest that…
