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M. Night Shyamalan's Trap fatally undermines its suspenseful premise The challenges of working mothers get all the ink--can they have it all? can they balance work and family?--but spare a [...]

Kevin Costner's Horizon is the culmination of a quest to make one more big-budget epic In 1990 a young stud of a movie star directed his first movie. It was […]

Rebel Ridge's action-movie vigilantism can't quite square with its moral vision If you aspire to make a good left-wing movie, you have my sympathies. Your first challenge is that most [...]

Luca Guadagnino films Challengers as a gay romance. Not since Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer oiled up for a beach-volleyball game in the original Top Gun has a cinematic sporting [...]

Civil War dodges the political questions inherent in warfare For several years I lived in northwest Washington, D.C., where Rock Creek Park makes a long gash through the city, its [...]

Dune: Part Two is a little uneasy with its hero's journey. In a recent essay for Modern Age, Noah Millman notes how many of 2023's movies were concerned with men [...]

Why audiences turned out for the leaden farce Anyone but You The year 2023 brought moviegoing back from the near-dead. But a mass art form can't rely on a 'Barbenheimer' [...]

Alexander Payne's 1970s-set prep-school movie reveals the artistic attractions of the pre-smartphone era Is Paul Giamatti the ugliest man to become a major movie star? His turn in The Holdovers, [...]

The big reveal in May December never seems to come Sometimes it's okay to be the guy who doesn't quite get it. Todd Haynes's May December is one of the [...]

Ridley Scott's Napoleon has no charisma whatsoever I watched the trailer for Ridley Scott's Napoleon this summer in an Airbnb in Paris, with my seven-year-old son crowded up against me, [...]

Killers of the Flower Moon transcends its many flaws The three-hour-and-26-minute running time of Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon gives the viewer ample time to meditate on the [...]

If asked to select a favorite Roald Dahl work, I would be inclined to choose two: Dahl's memoir of childhood, Boy, and The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six [...]

Dumb Money, a film about the wild meme-stock days of early 2021, when internet investors drove the price of the decrepit video-game chain GameStop to the moon, is an engaging [...]

The vibe has shifted. The worm has turned. For years now, wokeness has rolled over everything like a full moon's high tide. But I have seen a different future-one that's [...]

American teenagers in the age of the iPhone are exceedingly well behaved. They don't fight, they don't drink or drive drunk or really drive that much at all, and they [...]

In February I took my family to Walt Disney World, our first-ever trip. However mixed one's feelings about Disney, there's no denying that the theme-park experience is very good at [...]

I don't remember where I was for the hinge moment of the early 21st century, the great cultural turning point that arrived when Steve Jobs stepped onto a San Francisco [...]

The claim of disillusioned rightwing dissidents, that conservatism exists just to preserve the last round of liberal innovation, is sometimes applied unfairly, but you can feel its potency in the [...]

Ours was not a video-game household, but Nintendo still cast a long shadow over my 1980s childhood. As a six-year-old I slipped next door, to the shag carpet of a [...]

The early days of the pandemic were a time of mass transfixion, as millions of suddenly housebound viewers tuned in to the same streaming shows and Netflix specials, catching up [...]

Knowing little about the movie The Quiet Girl except its title and its Irish setting, you might be inclined to imagine it as a long-delayed sequel to or spin-off of [...]

It's been 13 years since the last time I set foot in the Shrek extended universe, with Shrek Forever After, a movie I barely remember even after digging up the [...]

There have been three phases in the career of M. Night Shyamalan. A period of mainstream glory, from The Sixth Sense through (arguably) The Village, when he made hit movies [...]

Amid an absolute box-office bloodbath for the autumn's Oscar-bait movie releases, I wrote over at my daily-newspaper day job an essay arguing that the problem wasn't just with an audience [...]

This year's Best Picture nominations are both a solid-enough set of choices and a decent snap shot of the condition of the industry. You have the Avatar sequel and Top [...]

A recurring theme in Christian science fiction--explicitly in C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy, implicitly in Madeleine L'Engle--is the idea that some planets beyond Earth might hold creatures who never experienced [...]

Two illustrative facts about the year in movies, 2022. Every movie in the box-office top ten was some kind of big-budget sequel or reboot. And not a single movie in [...]

When I was a boy I loved the movies. I had visions of assembling a set for a pirate movie in the wild ditch below our backyard, of transforming the [...]

Of all the realms of human entertainment, the one that is most alien to me is the elite food show. The ordinary food program, with the friendly celebrity chef who [...]

The Banshees of Inisherin, a bleak Irish tragicomedy from the mind of the playwright-turned-filmmaker Martin McDonagh, is basically a literalization of the long-running internet joke about how 'men will literally [...]

Let's get the preliminaries over with: Ticket to Paradise, starring Julia Roberts and George Clooney as a divorced and estranged couple who reunite in Bali to stop their daughter from [...]

Sometimes a strong aesthetic is enough. The first language of cinema is always visual, and if you understand beauty, if you have a distinctive vision of what you want to [...]

What should Hollywood do with Jon Hamm? The star of Mad Men, the ridiculously handsome incarnation of mid-century American masculinity, has been working steadily ever since his career-defining part wrapped [...]

George Miller, the director of Three Thousand Years of Longing, an extremely unexpected motion picture in which Tilda Swinton romances a genie, has certainly earned the right to direct any [...]

EMILY THE CRIMINAL, a small, spikey, effective movie about a downwardly mobile Millennial art-school graduate turning to a life of crime, is a political and moral Rorschach test that gradually [...]

It would disturb the entire ethos of this column if I were to become suddenly optimistic about the future of the movies. But tentatively, very tentatively, it's felt like mass-market [...]

Nope, the third exercise in high-concept horror-suspense from Jordan Peele, is a polarizing movie, with reactions and reviews all over the place. That makes sense once you see it, because [...]

The article discusses the current state of the film industry and the challenges it faces in producing successful movies. It highlights the dependence on non-superhero blockbusters and the lack of mid-budget movies that cater to adult audiences. The focus is on the movie "Hit Man," directed by Richard Linklater, which was bought by Netflix and had a limited theatrical release. The author questions whether the film is truly a mature and grown-up movie, as it combines elements of comedy and film noir but lacks the depth and moral exploration typically associated with adult-oriented films. [Extracted from the article]

The decline of Pixar can be charted with relative precision from its acquisition by Disney in 2006. After a few artistic high points that had been in the works before [...]

By rights Top Gun: Maverick should be the kind of movie that I tend to bemoan in this column: a nostalgia-steeped sequel to a 1980s blockbuster, a transparent attempt to [...]

There are two fairy tales playing in movie theaters at the moment--one created by a British director, Alex Garland, the other by a Frenchwoman, Celine Sciamma. In each one a [...]

Just about everyone who sees it loves Everything Everywhere All at Once. It's a rare recent movie to show some real word-of-mouth energy at the box office. Its critical score [...]

The scene that makes it clear what Robert Eggers is up to with The Northman, his lavish and intricate and absolutely testosterone-soaked Viking epic, arrives about 30 minutes into the [...]

I thought I'd said my piece about this year's Academy Awards in advance, both in this space and at greater length in my day job: how the year's nominees were [...]

Matt Reeves, the director of the latest Batman flick, has built a career making the kinds of movies that define current-era Hollywood--remakes of existing properties and reboots of famous franchises, [...]

What is the cinema of Covid-19? Presumably such a thing will eventually exist, but so far we don't have a lot of great examples. Since the entertainment industry got back [...]

The list of Best Picture nominees for the 2022 Oscars looks almost like a normal year in the movies. There are familiar names among the directors--Steven Spielberg, Paul Thomas Anderson, [...]

I didn't intend to review the new Disney movie, Encanto, in this column. I watched it for the first time the way many parents watch their kids' movies, in distracted [...]

THE LOST DAUGHTER, adapted by Maggie Gyllenhaal from an Elena Ferrante novel, is a movie about maternal ambivalence and rebellion: the mother who feels stifled by her children, imprisoned by [...]

There have been many ebbs and flows in conservatism over the last six and one-half decades, many passages through optimism and despair, but one great constant has been the sense [...]