One ordinary night in a working-class neighborhood of the Algerian capital, a suspicious car drives along a street where several children play carelessly. The driver lures a young girl to the window and violently pulls her inside before driving away as the girl’s brother looks on in despair. The unsettling incident, inspired by real events, […]

Traveling through clandestine airwaves, Kurt Cobain touched down in Havana, Cuba, in the turbulent early 1990s. A time of dire economic hardship for the island nation after the fall of the Soviet Union, the “Special Period” pushed thousands of Cubans to migrate, risking their lives at sea. Those who stayed suffered through great scarcity (the […]

Early in “The Lion King,” the adorable yet spoiled African prince Simba goes gallivanting around his father Mufasa’s lands, taunting his future subjects with the song “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King.” In Broadway terms, it’s a classic “I want” number, telling audiences what’s in the character’s heart at that point in the film, […]

There’s a horror film (“The Mouse Trap”) on our worst list this year. No surprise there; a lot of contemporary horror is bottom of the barrel. Yet it strikes us that a worst movies of the year roster is always, on some level, a list of horror films — movies that aren’t just mediocre or […]

For nearly a decade — since comedy legend Lily Tomlin played a salty septuagenarian in Paul Weitz’s “Grandma” — I’ve been trying to track down a copy of her one-woman show, “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.” Well, the search is over. Last week, on Friday night, Tomlin sat down with […]

The sort of relatably flawed everyday hero who might have been played by Mel Gibson or Bruce Willis back in the ’80s, Ethan Kopek always wanted to be a cop. Instead, he’s working airport security ¬¬— and not even the essential job of scanning passengers’ baggage for bombs. For the past three years, this dead-end […]

With snow on the ground and a cloud of uncertainty hanging over its next-to-last edition in Park City, the 41st annual Sundance Film Festival returns to its high-altitude Utah home, where the country’s most important showcase for independent cinema will unspool in person from Jan. 23-Feb. 2, 2025. While “discovery” remains the focus of the […]

There’s a downside to our ocean-of-content culture: It can be overwhelming. Scanning all those titles, all those options, you feel at moments like you’re drowning in possibility. Yet there’s a serious upside as well. In cinema, it’s not just that the endless options are enticing in their multiplicity — it’s that a great movie can […]

Long before Peter Jackson took a swing at “The Lord of the Rings,” audiences got a glimpse into the fantasy realm of J.R.R. Tolkien via a trio of late-’70s animated projects: two animated TV specials produced by Rankin/Bass (of which “The Hobbit” remains fairly well-liked) and a dark and ominous big-screen feature from Ralph Bakshi […]

Why? That one-word question bobs up more than once in “Freediver,” director Michael John Warren’s often fascinating documentary about Alexey Molchanov, a champion in a sport to which audiences may not have given much thought but won’t soon forget. Based on a piece by Daniel Riley published in GQ magazine in 2021, the movie begins […]