Due to modern medicine, people are living longer and more fruitful lives, but television depictions of those enjoying their golden years certainly haven’t caught up. There are anomalies, of course, like Netflix’s “Grace and Frankie,” Max’s “Hacks,” and the new CBS drama “Matlock,” but for the most part, ageism has pushed older adults to the […]

At the start of Turkish auteur Zeki Demirkubuz’s long-awaited and frustratingly miscalculated “Life” — the filmmaker’s first movie in seven years, now serving as Turkey’s international feature submission to the Academy Awards —a young woman named Hicran flees the claws of an impending arranged marriage and goes into hiding. We learn as much, not from […]

In 2024, there is no shortage of possible imagined dystopian futures. Not just because there’s an ever-growing canon of films that dream up humanity’s worst-case scenarios but because news about climate disasters, headlines about dwindling natural resources and well-founded fears about the encroaching power of AI dominate our day-to-day lives. That’s perhaps what makes Leticia […]

Twenty-five years after the release of the cult-classic film starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe and Reese Witherspoon, Prime Video is dropping a “Cruel Intentions” TV series. Adapted for television by Phoebe Fisher and Sara Goodman, this 21st-century retelling is a battle of wills between two volatile stepsiblings: the conniving and cross-wearing Caroline Merteuil (Sarah […]

To describe “The Merry Gentlemen” as “The Full Monty” meets a Christmas-themed Hallmark movie might be overselling the goods. However, that’s essentially the elevator pitch for this feature, in which a big-city dancer returns to her small town to save her parents’ concert venue by having hunks go shirtless on stage. Yet director Peter Sullivan […]

The scream that pierces through the opening of “Semmelweis” sets the tone for the 19th century-set drama from Lajos Koltai, about the groundbreaking Hungarian obstetrician Ignaz Semmelweis, immediately showing its concern for a very pregnant young woman desperately roaming the streets for a proper place to give birth. Loath to check in to local clinics […]

A deeply moving humanist drama with potent social and political undercurrents, “Abang Adik” charts the hardships faced by two orphaned Malaysian brothers who have no legal identity in the country of their birth. The mightily impressive first feature written and directed by renowned producer Jin Ong will move many viewers to tears as the brothers’ […]

While most nonfiction filmmakers remove themselves from the narrative equation of their work, never explicitly addressing their personal investment nor including their image or voice on screen, Chinese documentarian Nanfu Wang has forged her career doing exactly the opposite. The way her narration factors into each of her features, she has enmeshed her own experiences […]

Offering an unusual take on the Holocaust, “Nathan-ism” is a low-budget portrait of garrulous, elderly New York outsider artist Nathan Hilu, a proud but impoverished Jewish veteran who compulsively, maniacally documents his WWII military experience in naïve drawings with a black Sharpie and colored crayons. Unfortunately, his self-proclaimed autobiographical art does not always match up […]

In “The Wizard of Oz,” there can be no doubt which witch is the worst witch: That would be the one with the army of flying monkeys, who melts upon contact with water. But in “Wicked,” the green-skinned spell-caster turns out to be far more sympathetic than Glinda, her ostensibly “good,” oppressively pink rival. Loosely […]

Night after night, young Kenyan scholars sweat blood writing academic essays — on practically any given subject, often to gruelingly tight deadlines — for paying college students in far-away countries to pass off as their own work. The credit is non-existent, the pay pitiful given the expertise involved. But many of these tireless ghost writers […]

The film makes the powerful case that Netanyahu’s alliance with the far-right fringe of Israeli politics, which has culminated in his grotesque compulsion to extend the war in Gaza with no end in sight, has been essentially motivated by his attempt to evade the charges against him.

As of this writing, the third film in director Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” series has yet to receive an official greenlight. (The project technically remains in development.) Nonetheless, parent company Warner Bros. Discovery and producer Legendary Television have already begun the work of converting the movies’ billion-plus dollars in combined box office into a multimedia franchise; […]

Taylor Sheridan became one of TV’s most powerful creators with an epic saga set on a ranch, but his latest protagonist has little patience for agrarian fantasy. The landowner giving Tommy Norris (Billy Bob Thornton) a lecture isn’t really a rancher, the professional fixer argues: “You’re an oilman who spends the money we give you […]

Most films want their audiences to suspend disbelief. “About a Hero” would prefer they keep it close at hand. “Viewers are advised to exercise caution in trusting its visual and auditory components,” runs an onscreen disclaimer near the beginning of Polish filmmaker Piotr Winiewicz’s irreverent exercise in AI-enabled storytelling — a knowingly contentious opening film […]

Just past the halfway mark of her first of three Los Angeles shows last night, Sabrina Carpenter cracked a Colgate smile as she arrived at evening’s roulette moment, where she spins a bottle to determine which song she’ll cover. “Do you guys like to play games here?” she said. Recent picks at other dates on […]

Mercedes Arias and Delfina Vidal Frago take a romantic view of history in more ways than one in “Tito, Margot and Me,” a curious look at the love story between world-renowned British ballerina Margot Fonteyn and Panamanian politician Roberto “Tito” Arias. Recently selected by the latter country as its official Oscar entry for international feature, […]

Underground filmmaking duo Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn aren’t exactly honing a style with their new feature “Dream Team,” their fourth in 15 years. That would imply that there’s some fully realized form that their offhand humor and nonsense divergences are working toward. The film, which is receiving a limited theatrical release in New York […]

Showbiz has always made for strange bedfellows. Still, it’s hard to fathom any single personality linking talents as diverse as Pet Shop Boys, Bob Dylan, Fishbone, John Tesh, Diana Ross, Dusty Springfield, Toto, James Brown, TLC, Lulu, Stephen Stills, Tanya Tucker, Bette Midler, Gladys Knight, Scott Baio and Richard Simmons. Yet that list is just […]