Charges of beastly parents take on a literal meaning in Spellbound, a moving if somewhat familiar animated fantasy musical from Skydance Animation. When protagonist Ellian (Rachel Zegler) describes her parents as monsters, she’s not echoing the clichéd allegation lodged by teens everywhere. She’s being dead serious. Nearly a year ago, while ambling through the forest,
Movie Reviews
Andrew Stevens pays loving but not hagiographic tribute to his late mother, famed actress Stella Stevens, in his documentary recently showcased at the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival. The film convincingly makes the case that its subject, best known for her performances in such pictures as The Poseidon Adventure and The Nutty Professor, is severely
Critics of Benjamin Netanyahu will probably be disappointed to learn that there are no major revelations in The Bibi Files, Alexis Bloom’s documentary concerning the corruption charges that have been swirling around the Israeli prime minister since 2016. Nonetheless, they’ll find much to feast on — including the leaked footage of police interrogations of him,
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Wallace, the scattered entrepreneurial protagonist created by the Oscar-winning animator Nick Park, has an invention for everything. The modest suburban home on Wallaby Street that Wallace shares with his expressive beagle, Gromit, is filled with Rube Goldberg-esque gizmos. One machine, functioning as a kind of alarm, ejects
There’s something quintessentially American and straight out of Norman Rockwell about centering a survey of multiple generations around the living room, with idealized themes of home and family reinforced by scenes around the Christmas tree or the dining table, fully extended to accommodate the ever-expanding clan at Thanksgiving. But relatable doesn’t always mean interesting, even
Over the course of three Venom movies, Tom Hardy has done a lot to bring a modicum of gravitas to a profoundly silly story about a parasitic alien whose place in the Marvel universe cosmology has never made a lot of sense. At least to those not schooled in all things MCU. The fact that
Throughout A Family Affair, daughter Zara (Joey King) and mom Brooke (Nicole Kidman) argue over just what kind of a man Chris Cole (Zac Efron) is. To Zara, he’s a self-absorbed movie star boss who oscillates between unreasonable demands and threats of firing. For Brooke, he’s an attentive lover, the first man to reawaken her
If you want to breathe new life into a horror movie built around silence as the only means of surviving an alien invasion, there are countless worse ideas than relocating the story from smalltown U.S.A. to over-populated New York City. Opening screen text over an aerial shot of Manhattan accompanied by the cacophonous sounds of
Near the end of Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning, Venus Xtravaganza, an Italian Puerto Rican ballroom dancer who was one of the landmark queer doc’s subjects, describes a harrowing near-death experience. While Venus was hustling as a sex worker, a client realized she was a trans woman and reacted violently. “You’re a freak,” Venus recalls
Jessica Alba’s new starring vehicle boasts plenty of action movie credentials. The star, making her first feature film appearance in five years after guiding her business venture The Honest Company to a billion dollar-plus valuation, has previously displayed her skills in such film and television projects as Dark Angel and the Fantastic Four and Sin
In the world of celebrity documentaries, hagiographies reign supreme. Rare is the film that fulfills its promises of intimacy, vulnerability and never-before-seen perspectives. The films are generally risk-avoidant exercises that have perfected the optical illusion of making subjects seem closer than they actually are. I Am: Celine Dion abandons tricks of the eye for an
With a premise about young love, two charismatic leads and a title like Winter Spring Summer or Fall, Tiffany Paulsen’s feature is likely to draw vague comparisons to Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (and sequels). But while it’s highly unlikely to attain that canonical status, this film edges into distinctive enough territory thanks to Wednesday stars
Sister Helen Prejean is best known as the inspiration for the film Dead Man Walking, based on her 1993 book, with Sean Penn as a man facing the death sentence and Susan Sarandon as Sister Helen. But her story goes well beyond that. In the decades since, she has continued her campaign to save men
Technically, Atlas is a sci-fi flick. Set some unspecified number of years in the future, the Brad Peyton-directed feature concerns a data analyst (Jennifer Lopez) tasked with stopping “the world’s first AI terrorist,” a robot named Harlan (Simu Liu) who’d broken his own programming to orchestrate the slaughter of millions. But Blade Runner this isn’t,
Oliver Stone has always had one eye pointed south of the U.S. border. It began with his phenomenal script for Brian De Palma’s Scarface, which transformed the famous Chicago gangster into a hardened Cuban refugee. After that, Stone directed the photojournalist saga Salvador, about the deadly civil war that gripped El Salvador in the 1980s.
There’s no point in hiring Nicolas Cage if you’re not going to let him rip with a wackadoodle, OTT performance, and he duly delivers in the sly psychological thriller The Surfer. Calibrating his character’s descent into mental and physical disarray so that it happens by evenly distributed degrees, Cage is in only moderately demented form
Here’s how to take a children’s book geared to younger children and adapt it into an animated feature that adults can enjoy just as much: Simply hire Jared Hess and Jerusha Hess, the husband-and-wife screenwriting team responsible for such films as Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre, and have them apply their unique brand of off-kilter
Like one of those fiendish knots that tighten the more you squirm, director Magnus von Horn’s Cannes competitor The Girl With the Needle builds to a devastating climax, taut as piano wire. Danish actress Vic Carmen Sonne (Holiday, Godland) offers an understated but multi-layered performance as Karoline, a vulnerable but resilient seamstress living in post-WWI/early-1920s
If you appreciated Barbie’s eye-popping zaniness but its virtuous speechifying set your teeth on edge, have I got a sugary treat for you. And by “sugary,” I mean empty calories, not saccharine sentimentality. Gleefully silly — this is, after all, the directing debut of TV’s master of the domain of nothing — Unfrosted takes the
Many things weigh on Aza Holmes, the anxious protagonist of Hannah Marks’ Turtles All the Way Down, but none more than the existence of bacteria. Thoughts of these microorganisms — the ease with which they can infiltrate a body and the chances of infection — plague her. She worries about a wound on her left middle finger,
Fans regularly make film biopics about famous musicians successful, but they also love to nitpick the results. Or to misquote Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division and the subject of a rather good musical biopic (Control), love will tear apart any work of fan service if it screws up the story, paints the
Here’s a free tip to any nuns out there, or any young women thinking of becoming one: Whatever you do, don’t go to Italy, especially Rome. It’s not going to end well. Especially if you wind up pregnant. Arriving swiftly on the heels of Sydney Sweeney’s bloody twist on virgin birth in Immaculate comes The
It’s probably an overstatement to call writer-director Ryan Martin Brown’s feature debut, Free Time, a “generation-defining movie.” Shot in 10 days with a cast of relative unknowns, the micro-budget comedy has more or less passed under the radar, premiering at a bunch of midlevel festivals and receiving a limited release in select U.S. cities. (It’s
The Ghostbusters universe seems to be getting awfully crowded. The latest film in the franchise, celebrating its 40th anniversary (gulp), features a plethora of ghostbusters old and new, including the surviving members of the original cast, the characters introduced in 2021’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife, and a variety of eccentric new figures who are bound to figure
The Idea of You, the new romantic comedy from Michael Showalter (The Big Sick), begins like many of the best in its genre: a meet-cute so silly it endears. This one happens in a trailer that Solene (a delightful Anne Hathaway) confuses for a restroom during Coachella. The almost-40-year-old divorcée wasn’t supposed to be in
The details of American politics do not concern Alex Garland in Civil War. Despite the controversy it’s already courted about its supposed prescience, the unsettling feature from the British filmmaker doesn’t predict a future based on the country’s current two-party system. Garland is far more interested in the United States’ self-regarding exceptionalism, its belief in
Everyone in Kyle Hausmann-Stokes’ compassionate feature My Dead Friend Zoe has suffered a loss. Merit (Sonequa Martin-Green), a nervous Afghanistan war veteran, is reeling from the death of her closest friend in combat. Dr. Cole (Morgan Freeman), the supervisor of the court-mandated therapy sessions Merit must attend, grieves absences in his own life. And Merit’s
Creepy-doll characters are a fixture of countless horror movies, although few are as imposing as the life-size wooden mannequin that figures centrally in Irish writer-director Damian McCarthy’s Oddity. Rather than relying on an overtly identifiable genre template however, McCarthy’s second feature incorporates a distinctly internalized, foreboding atmosphere of dread that’s more unnerving than particularly frightening.
There’s a particularly intense scene early on in the new war movie Land of Bad. A young soldier is faced with a difficult choice when it comes to breakfast: Fruit Loops or Frosted Flakes. He stares at the two boxes intently, turning them over to compare their nutritional content (or lack thereof). It’s practically a
Austria’s refreshingly outré official submission to this year’s Oscars race (it didn’t advance to the shortlist) is a captivating exploration of glamour, schmoozing and the soul-draining superficialities of what Joni Mitchell called the star-making machinery. As with their previous features, directors Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel handle all the top-line production duties themselves on Vera,