The Oscar-nominated Somali immigrant Barkhad Abdi brought a non-professional’s awkward conviction to his modern-day Somali pirate line “I’m the captain now” in Tom Hanks’s...
‘God save us from white liberals,” a black TV news anchor told me as we exited a press screening of Cry Freedom, the 1987 biopic about the late South African activist Stephen Biko. I repeated...
Charlize Theron and Marion Cotillard outstrip Meryl Streep’s political grandstanding through their all-out physical embodiment of the moment’s anxieties and silliness. This week, both actresses...
Winston Churchill’s 1940 “We Shall Fight on the Beaches” speech is paraphrased in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, but after watching nearly two hours of uninspiring mayhem, it rings...
Part of the mess that Barack Obama left in the wake of his two presidential terms is the utter confusion that has descended upon black Americans who still feel stressed despite the media-promoted privilege...
The Marvel reboot Spider-Man: Homecoming is such a blatantly calculated example of pop-culture inoculation — it presents a teenage Peter Parker’s apprenticeship to the Avengers clan of superhero...
It’s baffling how often moviegoers who consider themselves politically savvy fall for assaults on their principles when the offense is disguised as “entertainment.” This week’s...
Lots of movies are manipulative, but Edgar Wright’s action-comedy Baby Driver defines the era by pampering its teenage audience. Yet its most impressive moment invokes an obscure but cinematic icon:...
Before praising Maudie, the lovely bio-pic featuring an amazing characterization by Sally Hawkins as Canadian painter Maudie Lewis, some commentary on the pertinence of movies and moral responsibility...
Tom Cruise is a product of the ’80s, the period when American movies gave up that mesmerizing 1970s spirit of self-examination and became fatally “high-concept.” Cruise’s recent...
Is Diana of Themyscira, the super Amazon heroine played by Gal Gadot in Wonder Woman, a character or an icon? The Wonder Woman movie, part of the Zack Snyder DC Comics universe magnificently dramatized...
The new Baywatch movie, a reboot of the Nineties beach-set crime-and-melodrama TV series, continues Hollywood’s unoriginal marketing. It holds momentary interest for the way it adapts television...
Ultra-hack Ridley Scott has ruined the Alien franchise. His first episode in 1979 was a visually textured, erotic genre film that veered sensually and sensationally into techno-evolutionary horror. It...
A new documentary about the New York Times arrives at just the moment America’s newspaper of record presents itself as something that stands not for news but for power, partisanship, and elitism....
James Gray’s unendurable The Lost City of Z tells of a white man’s folly. British military officer Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam), wanting to improve his social status and family name, explored...
Terence Davies’s A Quiet Passion has an impossible heroine — the poet Emily Dickinson. With his signature concentration, gravity, and beauty, Davies tells her story of spinsterhood and genius...
Our youth are fair game in the culture wars. The bright-faced young actors portraying 1990s AIDS activists in the new French film BPM (Beats Per Minute) have one particular thing in common with the nubile...
Movies An entertaining - if somewhat tired - film, Desp*cable Me 3 is one where most members of the family will find something to enjoy. Watch out for the mildly crude antics of minions...
Movies So THIS is the movie that finally makes me say it's time for the raunch-com to die. Even Warner Bros. knew they had an inconsequential stinker on their hands, opting not to screen it for media...
Movies The hardest films to pull off aren't works that are completely original, but those that take familiar scenarios and archetypes and make us feel wholly invested in an outcome. In Baby Driver,...