Almost all of the history of American movies flows into Steven Spielberg, and the movies that have come since can’t help but be in response. As a storyteller and as a cultural figure, his closest precedent isn’t John Ford or David Lean, but Dickens, another age’s popular titan, beloved more…
Three Colorado films are headed to Sundance. One has landed a Netflix deal.
Accepting the Welt Literature Prize in Berlin on November 10 of this year, the novelist Zadie Smith said, “Time travel is a discretionary art: a pleasure trip for some and a horror story for others.” She was speaking, of course, of the conviction among so many white people that there’s…
“With all respect, sir, may I ask, who are you?” “What you see before you is a man, a simple monk.” “Are you the Lord Buddha?” “I believe I am a reflection, like the moon on water. When you see me, and I try to be a good man, you…
Martin Scorsese opens his foreword to the latest edition of Shusaku Endo’s Silence with a simple, impossible question: “How do you tell the story of Christian faith?” The director isn’t presumptuous enough to present his adaptation of that beloved novel as a definitive answer, but his film does read as…
This is your guide to the ten best films in January.
Like many people after Carrie Fisher’s untimely passing on Tuesday, Dec. 27, I was moved to revisit Postcards From the Edge, the Mike Nichols–directed film that Fisher adapted from her own novel. This was the sole feature screenwriting credit for the actress-novelist, despite the fact that she was for decades…
Complicated subjects dominated cinema in 2016. Take The Lobster, a strange story about finding love (or not finding love) in the modern world, or Moonlight, in which director Barry Jenkins inspected the psyche of a gay black man growing up in poverty in south Florida. Our critics reviewed them all…
What does it take for a woman to win the trust it takes to become an action director? For Anna Foerster, it took two decades, an expert’s knowledge of visual effects and cinematography and a directing gig on key episodes of a cult television show — Starz’s Outlander. Now she’s…
Once upon a time, in the dark ages of not-that-long-ago, foreign television was a mysterious land beyond our reach. Aside from the occasional British import, the wonders of international series were limited to those equipped with multi-region DVD players. Scandinavian gloom mostly stayed in Scandinavia. Thanks to streaming, it’s now…
Mourners have been flocking to the Denver Art Museum to honor Carrie Fisher, whose Princess Leia robe is featured in Star Wars and the Power of Costume exhibit. And just a few blocks away, another museum recalls one of the iconic roles of her mother, Debbie Reynolds: The Molly Brown…
Saroo Brierley’s memoir A Long Way Home examines, in its uncertain prose, one of the signal concerns of our age: How do those of us who have grown up in relative comfort square our good luck with the lot of the rest of the world? That question gets feinted at…
“Henry was 18 when we met, and I was Queen of France. He came down from the north to Paris with a mind like Aristotle and a form like mortal sin. We shattered the commandments on the spot.” So declares Eleanor of Aquitaine (Katharine Hepburn) about her estranged husband, England’s…
2017 looks like it won’t be an improvement over 2016, so here are some promising films — either reviewed or previewed — to distract you in the next three months. In keeping with the pessimism most of the country is feeling, we’re also considering “what could be bad” in the…
Like craft beers or your news feed, Netflix’s niche-viewing categories are forever growing more micro-specific. Its new drama series, an eight-part bafflement called The OA, could only be categorized as a Sexually Frank Spiritual Locked-Room Suburban Afterlife Mad Scientist Communitarian Interpretive-Dance Ripped-From-the-Headlines Horror Puzzle Mystery. Its flavors never unite into…
Carrie Fisher was always smarter than the words and roles written for her, smarter than what Hollywood thought it wanted out of a princess. On Christmas Eve of the all-devouring Sarlacc that is 2016, after word had spread that Fisher had suffered a heart attack, a page from her original…
As if 2016 wasn’t twisted enough, the Coen brothers made a mediocre movie, and Blake Lively pleasantly surprised our critics.
In the early scenes of the sci-fi drama Passengers, Chris Pratt gets to be every dope who ever woke up in the middle of the night, thought it was morning and started to make the coffee. Too bad for him, morning is still 90 years away, and the coffee sucks…
I shouldn’t have to explain why Fences, the August Wilson play set in the 1950s and now adapted for the screen, is important. If you’ve stepped anywhere near the theater — and I mean the playhouse here — you’ve read, seen, or heard about it. Wilson, who didn’t study theater…
Dutch provocateur Paul Verhoeven has dedicated his career to sifting through trash to extract ugly truths. He’s a former math and physics student who decided movies make more sense, but it’s hard to picture him crunching numbers and plugging in formulas and dealing with absolute answers, as his proudly pugnacious…
The Assassin’s Creed video games are about skipping through tedious cut scenes set in the present so that you can vault into the past, through and over gorgeous recreations of the roofs and streets of medieval and Renaissance cities. Sometimes you chase floating feathers through Florence. Often, you’ll sneak behind…
Twenty years ago, director Wes Craven and writer Kevin Williamson took us to the small California town of Woodsboro, where a horror-movie-obsessed masked killer was stalking and killing a group of teens who grew up watching slasher-film greats. This week, that film, Scream, celebrates its twentieth anniversary with a massive…
