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
Movie Reviews
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,
When, in the opening minutes of Natatorium, a fresh-faced teen arrives at a blocky modernist showplace of a house, it seems she’s checking in to a swanky Airbnb. But the well-appointed dwelling, where an oppressively dark glacial blue predominates, turns out to be the unwholesome home of the grandparents she hasn’t seen in years. Estrangement