Since the death of her mother, 10-year-old Amber Wyatt (Bianca Belle) has been bothered by all sorts of dark thoughts. Rather than act on those impulses, Amber commits her most monstrous ideas to a secret journal, purging anxieties from her subconscious though art. The process would be therapeutic, if not for a gnarly twist that […]

You’ve heard of “faith-based movies”? Well, “Heretic” is essentially the opposite. In A24’s thorny, impossible-to-anticipate thriller, co-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (best known as the writers of “A Quiet Place”) ask audiences to accept Hugh Grant as a demented religious scholar so extreme, he’s arranged to trap two Mormon missionaries in his house and […]

The Venice Film Festival continued its ascent this year, rivaling Cannes — long the undisputed king of all film festivals — in its capacity to draw stars, spark debate and drive sales of first-rate art films. While some of the bigger titles fizzled (Todd Phillips’ gonzo musical sequel to 2019 Golden Lion winner “Joker” disappointed, and Kevin […]

According to tradition, debutante balls are designed to introduce young ladies to polite society. But in Australian comedy star Rebel Wilson’s rowdy directorial debut, “The Deb,” there isn’t really anything that resembles “polite society.” Wilson’s characters run the gamut from uncouth to in-your-face offensive — none more than the tacky small-town beautician Wilson embodies in […]

It’s possible that the issue at the heart of “A Missing Part” will resolve itself in a few years. Japan, currently the only country in the G7 which doesn’t recognize the legal concept of joint child custody, is finally set to modernize in 2026, ending a situation where any contested divorce can result in one […]

The phrase “voice of a generation” gets thrown around a lot, but if that label were defined by sheer recognizability, it would be hard to find a better fit than James Earl Jones, who died Tuesday. The real question is: which generation? Depending on whether you were born before or after the year 1990, chances […]

A gorgeous computer-generated cartoon with a human heart beating beneath its sleek, state-of-the-art surface, DreamWorks Animation’s “The Wild Robot” arrives at a time when the public seems more concerned than ever about being outsmarted by artificial intelligence. It’s somewhat ironic then that the movie, a lovely chosen-family fable adapted from the first book in Peter Brown’s […]

“I pursued the glitz for a while. And I don’t regret it. But I know it wasn’t the real thing. It wasn’t the real thing.” This sentiment, which could almost be poetry or song lyrics, is spoken by Edna O’Brien in one of the final interviews she gave, which appears toward the end of director […]

It’s been more than half a century since Helen Reddy sang, “I am woman, hear me roar!” but the line remains as good a mantra as any for Amy Adams’ ferocious lead performance in Marielle Heller’s tamer-than-expected “Nightbitch.” Identified only as “Mother” in the credits, Adams plays a woman who gave up her career to […]

One moment, award-winning chef Almut (Florence Pugh) is waking her beloved Tobias (Andrew Garfield) and asking him to sample her latest concoction, the next, it’s the middle of the night, and now-pregnant Almut is parked on the toilet while he times her contractions. Effective love stories are composed of moments large and small. In “We […]

Some people bring happiness and positivity into the world, illuminating the lives of all around them, and some make flowers wilt and milk curdle wherever they go. As Pansy, Marianne Jean-Baptiste embodies the latter sort in “Hard Truths,” coming away from her reunion with “Secrets & Lies” director Mike Leigh with her richest character yet […]

No doubt, the Janson brothers — Homer, Ulysses, Atlas and Arlo — are lovely, well-behaved kids in real life. (No sanity-respecting director would cast them in a movie if that weren’t the case.) Few would say the same about the undisciplined orphans these four boys play in director David Gordon Green’s odd-choice Toronto Film Festival […]

The 1958 version of “Bonjour Tristesse” is everything Hollywood seems to be wary of these days: a notoriously mean, allegedly misogynistic filmmaker’s interpretation of a book written by and about a French teenage girl. “He used me like a Kleenex and then threw me away,” Jean Seberg said of director Otto Preminger. Well, get out […]

In August Wilson’s play “The Piano Lesson” — revived on Broadway in 2022, adapted with care and much the same cast for the screen by Malcolm Washington — Berniece hasn’t played the piano since her mother died. It just sits in her living room, reminding her of everything her parents, and their parents before them, […]

Twenty years ago, I was fortunate enough to visit the set of “Team America: World Police,” an ambitious Jerry Bruckheimer-style action parody, starring puppets, for which Trey Parker and Matt Stone had constructed an enormous North Korean set out of cocktail umbrellas and take-out containers. Driven by equal parts obstinacy and nostalgia (for the vintage […]

When Robbie Williams told an interviewer that he felt like a performing monkey, he didn’t mean it literally. But that’s exactly how “The Greatest Showman” director Michael Gracey interprets the remark in “Better Man,” an off-the-wall musical biopic that surely would have seemed banal — as opposed to downright bananas — had it featured a […]

From “Boy A” (the movie that launched Andrew Garfield’s career) to “Zero for Conduct,” movies set in broken boarding schools and juvenile reformatory centers are a dime a dozen. With “Nickel Boys,” director RaMell Ross finds fresh colors in such a rigidly codified genre, turning a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel into a minimalist tone poem. The […]

Over nearly 1,000 episodes, “Saturday Night Live” has given America some of its most successful comedians, iconic characters and quotable catchphrases. Now, just one year shy of the pop phenom’s 50th anniversary, director Jason Reitman gives back, turning an oral history of the very first episode into a rowdy, delectably profane backstage homage. “Saturday Night” […]

With “The Act of Killing,” director Joshua Oppenheimer approached the documentary form in a radical, seemingly unthinkable way, inviting his subjects — Indonesian gangsters who had once served on the country’s death squads — to reenact their crimes on camera. Why should his narrative debut be any more conventional? For “The End,” Oppenheimer conceives a […]