Really, where does the time go? It’s already been 16 years since Lara Croft: Tomb Raider kicked butt at the box office. Star Angelina Jolie was still in her wild child, I wear-a-vial-of-Billy Bob’s-blood, pre-humanitarian mode. Three onscreen Spider-Mans have scaled walls in red tights in the interim. So yeah, a reboot is way overdue. […]
Kingsman: The Golden Circle encapsulates everything that’s wrong with movies, and I don’t say that lightly. Bloated, nonsensical and disgustingly vulgar, it attempts to entertain by way of sheer blunt force. This is a picture that thinks it’s good times because in the opening sequence, two guys try to kill each other in the back […]
Jake Gyllenhaal admits it early on in Stronger, his voice seething with anger and exasperation. “I’m not a hero,” he says on the way home from the hospital. He’s wrong. His Jeff Bauman just lost both legs in the Boston Marathon Bombing and now an ordinary guy must face an extraordinary struggle. Yet. . . […]
That exclamation point at the end of the title is deliberate. If anything, it undersells. Mother! isn’t just a thriller in which you get sufficiently frightened as it unspools and then exit the theater wondering what’s for dinner. It’s a true mind-melting wowza that rivets from the first seemingly innocent moment to the last dagger […]
I don’t know the first thing about poker. It’s important to state this upfront because going into Molly’s Game — the fantastic new Aaron Sorkin movie about the ultimate card shark — I was worried about keeping up with spitfire talk of flops and rivers. Now that I’ve seen it, I can safely proclaim that . . […]
Welcome to suburbicon! It’s a gee-whiz community where nice people — nice white people, that is! — reside on manicured lawns and raise their wholesome families. Everybody is super-friendly and always say hello to each other at the grocery store. Then one day, a black family moves into town. The aghast postman can barely even deliver the […]
So, the clown. His name is Pennywise. His face is the color of ash and his lips the color of blood. He menaces early on in IT — bursting onto the scene with all the abruptness of a jack in the box — by pretending to play nice with a sweet boy. Poor little Georgie never […]
On top of everything else, the kitchen isn’t even all that! This is crucial information, give that Home Again is a Nancy Meyers production. It’s impossible to watch a Meyers film, from Something’s Got to Give to It’s Complicated, and not be overcome with aspirational home décor FOMO. Her characters get to fall in love and use […]
Spoiler: Billy Jean King wins. Not just the epic 1973 Battle of the Sexes tennis match against Bobby Riggs, but the fantastic, feel-great movie of the same name. This is her story, and, to wit, an illustration of how one shy, unassuming woman was determined to change the game. Inspired yet? Just you wait. The […]
Emma Stone is Billy Jean King. Steve Carell is Bobby Riggs. They square off on the tennis courts in the wonderful, heart-swelling Battle of the Sexes. I just got out of the world premiere screening at the Telluride Film Festival. Here’s my first take!