From its opening image — of a distraught woman battling massive ocean waves on a moonlit night — to its surprisingly ambiguous final shot — of what, I won’t say — Kubo and the Two Strings sears itself into your brain. The stop-motion animation studio Laika has perfected, over the…
Pete’s Dragon is as cuddly as the mountains of plush toys Disney hopes to sell from it. A disarmingly homespun blockbuster, this loose remake of the studio’s 1977 live-action/animation hybrid is perhaps best defined by all the things it’s not: It’s not a soaring action flick, nor an indulgence in…
On both an emotional and narrative level, a Hirokazu Kore-eda film pulls you in slowly, almost unexpectedly. The acclaimed Japanese director, whose works include After Life (1998), Still Walking (2008) and Like Father, Like Son (2013), makes movies about things like loss, abandonment and death, but his distinct touch —…
“The world changed when Superman flew across the sky,” Viola Davis’ Amanda Waller says early on in Suicide Squad. “And then it changed again when he didn’t,” she continues, over somber images of the Man of Steel’s funeral following his (non-)death at the end of Batman v. Superman. Luckily, that…
A more appropriate title for Jason Bourne might be Walking: The Motion Picture. This fifth entry in the franchise loosely (very loosely) based on Robert Ludlum’s best-selling novels brings back director Paul Greengrass and star Matt Damon to continue the tale of the good soldier-turned-amnesiac-assassin-turned-rogue agent doing battle against his…
Café Society is surprisingly ambitious by the standards of late-period Woody Allen — a veritable epic taking in a broad swath of a young man’s life and charting his progress from wide-eyed innocent to cold, confident operator. But that’s also why the film, in some senses, could only have been…
In Anna Rose Holmer’s The Fits, emotion becomes motion and psychology becomes space. It’s a coming-of-age story, but Holmer mostly eschews dialogue and standard storytelling devices; she tells her tale through movements and patterns and the way that she films them. The Fits follows Toni (Royalty Hightower), an 11-year-old tomboy…
Star Trek Beyond might be the Star Trekkiest film of the new, J.J. Abrams-ified Trek era. That is to say, it’s the one that feels the most like a turbo-loaded episode of the original series, and has at least some of that classic spirit of exploration and derring-do. That’s not…
James DeMonaco’s Purge series, about a near future in which all crime is legal for one annual 12-hour period, began as a disturbing setup for basic genre thrills: 2013’s franchise-starter was essentially a home-invasion thriller with a dystopian twist. By the time Purge: Anarchy rolled around a year later, the…
Stanley Kubrick once sent his friend John le Carré a letter about why he couldn’t adapt one of the author’s books. “Essentially,” he wrote, “how do you tell a story it took the author 165,000 (my guess) good and necessary words to tell, with 12,000 words (about the number of…
In one of many throwaway gags in The Secret Life of Pets, a group of dogs gathering for an all-important rescue operation is momentarily sidetracked by a butterfly, which sends them into a riot of leaping and yelping. Pets are easily distracted, you see. And you know who else is…
Can Steven Spielberg do comedy? That seems like a dumb question, since nobody has done more to bring wit to the modern blockbuster; Raiders of the Lost Ark and Jaws boast as many laugh-out-loud moments as they do thrills. But those gags are often incidental, of the tension-breaking kind. When…
An unlikely buddy comedy-drama about the friendship between a suicidal castaway played by Paul Dano and a flatulent corpse played by Daniel Radcliffe, Swiss Army Man doesn’t seem like the kind of movie you’d watch with your mother. So what was it like to be the mothers of the film’s…
The most surprising thing about the new buddy action-comedy Central Intelligence is the sight of Kevin Hart playing straight man to another actor’s antics. In previous comedies, Hart has been the pint-sized, fast-talking dynamo at the center of the action. Even in movies where he’s the guy in over his…
Woodrow Wilson described D.W. Griffith’s notorious Civil War epic Birth of a Nation as “writing history with lightning.” Gary Ross’ Free State of Jones, which covers roughly the same period as Griffith’s film, is more like writing history with index cards. Diligent and informative but also fragmented and inert, it…
In cinema, all things move towards acceptance. In time, debates about filmmakers usually settle in favor of the filmmaker — not because detractors change their minds, but because the urgency of the conflict wanes, and stalemates go to the fans. It’s hard to believe that battle lines were once drawn…
If you can get past the spectacle of British and Australian actors portraying some of the most important figures of 20th-century American literature, Genius is a good example of a prestige pic that is not only literate but surprisingly vibrant. It’s the story of the tumultuous relationship between hot-tempered, Asheville-born…
Finding Nemo may have been a cartoon about a clownfish traveling across the ocean looking for his son, but it was also one of Pixar’s first overt forays into the workings of the human mind. The film, from 2003, was haunted by loss: The protagonist, Marlin (voiced by Albert Brooks),…
Dylan Reeve and David Farrier’s Tickled might be the oddest documentary you’ll see this year. It starts off with Farrier, a New Zealand TV reporter specializing in human-interest fare, discovering the world of Competitive Endurance Tickling — in which teams of strapping young men tickle each other for extended periods…
Back in 2013, James Wan’s The Conjuring represented the high point of a wave of mainstream horror that showed there was still value in old-school scares — that there was life beyond torture porn and slick slasher reboots. It was a ghost story-turned-possession thriller that mined terror out of the…
There’s a scene during the first half of Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Apocalypse that is so emotionally resonant, so well-put-together and so quiet that you might briefly forget you’re watching a superhero film. It involves a raid by some Polish officers in the remote forest where Erik Lehnsherr, aka Magneto (Michael…
At long last, Whit Stillman has adapted a Jane Austen book. To be sure, he has touched on her work numerous times — particularly in his 1990 directorial debut Metropolitan, in which an argument about Mansfield Park gave us the immortal line “I don’t read novels. I prefer good literary…
