In a highly unusual competition that’s been taking place over the last year, all pegged to the future location of the Sundance Film Festival (“Hey, cities of America! Want to host a world-class independent film festival? Enter our sweepstakes now!”), the most unusual moment had to be the unveiling, this week, of the three finalists […]

In any presidential campaign where Donald Trump is a candidate, anger is going to have a central place at the table. Trump’s anger can take many forms, from snarky bullying to raging-bull frothing. In the three debates he had with Hillary Clinton in 2016, she had no idea how to deal with him. She tried […]

What you hear in "Road Diary" is the life force of Springsteen as an artist. He plays a number of new songs, but the fact that he’s been playing the old ones for as long as he has only adds to their layered majesty.

It’s been labeled as a "thriller," but I’d describe it more as a misanthropic survivalist "Robinson Crusoe" meets "Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" meets "Lord of the Flies" with deranged footnotes by Friedrich Nietzsche.

"Never Too Late," co-directed by R.J. Cutler ("The September Issue," "Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry") and David Furnish, who is Elton’s husband, sets what has become Elton’s living-fast-and-bottoming-out agony-of-fame mythology in the context of a detailed and archivally rich account of that period. So watching it, it means something again.

A middlebrow triumph-against-the-odds sports crowd-pleaser can be a beautiful thing — that is, if it doesn’t pander and lose itself in clichés, and if it has as much respect for reality as it does for getting an inspirational rise out of you. “Unstoppable,” a wrestling drama based on the life of the college champion Anthony […]

"Joker: Folie à Deux" may be ambitious and superficially outrageous, but in a basic way it’s an overly cautious sequel. Phillips has made a movie in which Arthur really is just poor Arthur; he does nothing wrong and isn’t going to threaten anyone’s moral sensibilities.

you might say that the movies, in some grand collective way, are nothing less than a rehearsal for death. Yet it’s still rare to encounter a big-screen drama that grabs death by the horns, that looks it in the eye, that asks us to confront its daunting reality on every level the way Pedro Almodóvar’s lyrical and moving "The Room Next Door" does.

The spark plug of "Wolfs," as written and directed by Jon Watts (who directed all three of the Tom Holland "Spider-Man" films), is the nonstop stream of hostility and one-upmanship that passes between Clooney and Pitt like something out of an acid screwball comedy.

It’s three hours and 15 minutes long, it’s paced with a pleasing stateliness and overflows with incident and emotion — and it spins out the story of László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian-born Jewish architect who journeys from Budapest to America after World War II, as if Corbet were making a biopic about a real person.

"The Order," while scrupulously true to the events of 1983 and 1984, presents itself as a cautionary allegory of what’s happening today: the entwined rise of MAGA and Christian nationalism and the racist dog whistles (and, at times, racist sirens) of Donald Trump’s campaign to take over America.

"Babygirl" takes a few turns we don’t expect, but that’s because the movie’s ambition isn’t just to feed the thriller engine. It’s to capture something genuine about women’s erotic experience in the age of control.