All right, Virginia… Whereas so many family holiday films hinge on whether kids believe in Santa Claus, Netflix charmer “That Christmas” makes the case that it’s more important for kids to believe in themselves. Adapted from a trio of picture books by “Love Actually” scribe Richard Curtis, the feel-good animated feature is chock full of […]

In “Brothers,” Josh Brolin and Peter Dinklage play adult twins, Moke and Jady Munger, who’ve been criminal accomplices ever since their jewelry-heisting mom abandoned them as kids. You hear the pitch for director Max Barbakow’s follow-up to his 2020 Sundance phenom “Palm Springs,” and it’s fair to assume that the two actors’ mismatched appearances will […]

SPOILER ALERT: The following essay discusses key plot points of “Joker: Folie à Deux,” including the ending. It is intended to be read after (rather than instead of) seeing the film. I hated Todd Phillips’ original “Joker,” which made me feel like a crank when the hit anti(super)hero movie went on to earn the top […]

Canadian couple Édith Lemay and Sebastian Pelletier are blessed with four children, but three have a congenital condition which means that before too long they will lose their sight. To enable them to see all the sights they will soon no longer be able to experience for themselves, and enjoy memories rather than just descriptions, […]

The notion of being “stuck in the past” applies both literally and figuratively to the siblings with a shared troubled history in “Things Will Be Different,” the feature directorial debut of editor Michael Felker. The title of this proficiently tense, lo-fi time-travel crime thriller reads like a promise of change, of overcoming past mistakes with […]

Long before “True Blood” or “Twilight” brought vampires to small-town America, horror writer Stephen King imagined the creatures invading his backyard in rural Maine (technically, a fictional place called Jerusalem’s Lot). Until then, blood-sucking bat-men were something only Europeans had to worry about, as Dracula and his castle-dwelling kin preyed on hapless villagers half a […]

Andy Warhol imagined a future where everyone would be world-famous for 15 minutes — a prediction that has effectively come to pass, courtesy of TikTok and reality TV. So here’s a revised forecast: We now live in a time when everyone can (and a great many will) have documentaries made about them. That may already […]

Frankie (Ariella Mastroianni) is a young single mother struggling to make enough money, having just been fired from her job as a gas station attendant. Finding another gig isn’t going to be easy. Gainful employment is a tough ask for Frankie, who is living with a rare degenerative brain condition called dyschronometria, meaning she has […]

In the 2022 HBO docuseries “The Last Movie Stars,” Ethan Hawke floats the possibility that the great Joanne Woodward’s risk-it-all role — the one that could have won the “Three Faces of Eve” star a second Oscar, had it gone differently — was playing a failed starlet who resorts to burlesque to get by. Adapted […]