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Fame, at least lasting fame--the your-work goes-down-in-history kind, often accompanied by fat royalty payments--is a club that thinks of itself as an unbiased meritocracy, blind to everything but aesthetic innovation [...]

THE TEN BEST MOVIES OF THE YEAR By DAVID EDELSTEIN 1. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood In this gorgeously meandering farrago, two aging, increasingly irrelevant white males from '50s [...]

* NOAH BAUMBACH RARELY does adaptations of other people's work, instead opting to mine his own emotional fissures for dramatic gold. He tends to go for the ugliest nuggets--the jagged [...]

MIDSOMMAR DIRECTED BY ARI ASTER. A24. NR. YESTERDAY DIRECTED BY DANNY BOYLE. UNIVERSAL PICTURES. PG-13. AT THE CLIMAX of the writer-director Ari Aster's supremely un-fun debut, Hereditary, a character saws [...]

THE DEAD DON'T DIE DIRECTED BY JIM JARMUSCH. R. DOMINO DIRECTED BY BRIAN DE PALMA. R. When I heard Jim Jarmusch had made a zombie comedy called The Dead Don't [...]

IT'S TEMPTING to call him 'the inimitable Al Pacino,' although he is the most imitated actor in the world. There are, after all, two categories of imitation: impersonation ('Say hello [...]

IT'S 11 DAYS BEFORE the first preview of the Roundabout Theatre production of All My Sons when I sit down to talk with Annette Bening about her return to Broadway [...]

TRANSIT DIRECTED BY CHRISTIAN PETZOLD. MUSIC BOX FILMS. NR. GRETA DIRECTED BY NEIL JORDAN. FOCUS FEATURES. R. ANNA SEGHERS'S 1944 novel Transit--the basis for the vexing, fascinating new film by [...]

PLUS: Our top picks in comic books, video games, stand-up specials, and podcasts, and a sprawling survey of culture-makers on their favorite movies, TV shows, albums, and performances, and the [...]

20TH CENTURY WOMEN DIRECTED BY MIKE MILLS. ANNAPURNA/A24. R. SILENCE DIRECTED BY MARTIN SCORSESE. PARAMOUNT. R. TONI ERDMANN DIRECTED BY MAREN ADE. SONY PICTURES CLASSICS. R. As a 55-year-old single [...]

A GOOD HORROR FILM might not be conventionally good so much as unconventionally horrible. That's the category into which I'd put Ari Aster's debut, Hereditary, which is disjointed, lugubrious, and [...]

DISOBEDIENCE DIRECTED BY SEBASTIAN LELIO. BLEECKER STREET. R. THREE NICE JEWISH girls in two very different kinds of movies occupy my Tribeca Film Festival-oriented column this issue, and I am--as [...]

In Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread,, a hush attends the illustrious British women's-clothing designer Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) as he wields a tape measure with delicate precision, runs his long [...]

EVERYTHING COMES together for Greta Gerwig in her marvelous solo directorial debut, Lady Bird, in which Saoirse Ronan plays a Sacramento 17-year-old named Christine McPherson who adopts the titular nom [...]

THE BEGUILED DIRECTED BY SOFIA COPPOLA. FOCUS FEATURES. R. MY COUSIN RACHEL DIRECTED BY ROGER MICHELL. FOX SEARCHLIGHT. PG-13. ONE OF THE MOST EXCITING THINGS about more female-directed major movies [...]

ALIEN: COVENANT DIRECTED BY RIDLEY SCOTT. FOX. R. SNATCHED DIRECTED BY JONATHAN LEVINE. FOX. R. THE WRITERS of the 1979 sci-fi horror movie Alien conceived oftheir title entity as a [...]

ONE WEEK AND A DAY DIRECTED BY ASAPH POLONSKY. OSCILLOSCOPE LABORATORIES. NR. FREE FIRE DIRECTED BY BEN WHEATLEY. A24. R. THE LOSS OF ONE'S CHILD--the most devastating event in this [...]

JEFF NICHOLS'S HUSHED, intense film Loving is named for the mixed-race couple Richard and Mildred Loving, whose 1958 arrest in Caroline County, Virginia, would lead, a decade on, to the [...]

SPACESHIP EARTH DIRECTED BY MATT WOLF. NEON. TAINTED IN THE PUBLIC imagination by misfortune, miscalculation, and lack of transparency, the 1991 experiment in sustainable living known as Biosphere 2 went [...]

THE GUATEMALA of the grim drama Our Mothers (Nuestras Madres) sits on top of a boneyard, its buildings crumbling into the earth as if to merge with their former, murdered [...]

THE OTHER LAMB DIRECTED BY MALGORZATA SZUMOWSKA. IFC FILMS. IN THE SURREAL subjugation film The Other Lamb, a Jesus-esque kind of guy who answers to the name 'Shepherd' slowly walks [...]

FIRST COW DIRECTED BY KELLY REICHARDT. A24. PG-13. THE DIRECTOR Kelly Reichardt edits her own films, and her rhythms at the start of her 19th-century frontier drama, First Cow, are [...]

STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER DIRECTED BY J. J. ABRAMS. DISNEY. PG-13. Fanbrats, have I got a movie for you! Star Wars: Episode IX--The Rise of Skywalker has none [...]

A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD DIRECTED BY MARIELLE HELLER. SONY. PG. THE REVELATION OF Morgan Neville's wonderful 2018 documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor? was that, away from the [...]

Why have Johnny Depp's movies been so bad lately? Blame his idols. * IT'S UNAPPETIZING, the prospect of scoring easy points off Johnny Depp over his string of commercial and [...]

DO NOT SUBJECT yourself to the gruelingly close-up documentary Weiner if what you care most about is seeing its protagonist, the former U.S. congressman and New York City mayoral candidate [...]

MARTIN SCORSESE RANGES toward extremes, which is why he'll be a manic showboater in one movie and practice scrupulous self-abnegation in the next. But his gingerly paced, three-and-a-half-hour The Irishman [...]

TWICE IN BONG JOON-HO'S acid black comedy Parasite (which won the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival), characters exclaim 'That's a metaphor!' about something they're looking at--which I [...]

JOKER DIRECTED BY TODD PHILLIPS. WARNER BROS. R. GROUNDBREAKING WORKS are often dangerous, flouting aesthetic and moral norms, forcing you to see the world from angles you'd rather not, through [...]

Ad Astra (9/20) I rarely plunder studio synopses, but this one seems unusually pithy: 'An astronaut travels to the outer edges of the solar system to find his father and [...]

THE NIGHTINGALE DIRECTED BY JENNIFER KENT. IFC FILMS. R. FOR SAMA DIRECTED BY WAAD AL-KATEAB AND EDWARD WATTS. PBS DISTRIBUTION. NR. A SOCIETY IS MEASURED by how it treats its [...]

THE SOUVENIR DIRECTED BY JOANNA HOGG. A24. R. THE BRITISH writer-director Joanna Hogg has the courage of her incoherence. Her scaffolding is shaky and her vantage often oblique. She cuts [...]

ONCE YOU GET OVER the disappointment that Jordan Peele's second feature, Us, isn't as trim or impish in its satire as his marvelous debut, Get Out, you can settle back [...]

GLORIA BELL DIRECTED BY SEBASTIAN LELIO. A24. R. WOMAN AT WAR DIRECTED BY BENEDIKT ERLINGSSON. MAGNOLIA PICTURES. NR. AT AN EMOTIONAL LOW POINT in Gloria Bell, the title character (Julianne [...]

HIGH FLYING BIRD DIRECTED BY STEVEN SODERBERGH. NETFLIX. NR. ARCTIC DIRECTED BY JOE PENNA. BLEECKER STREET PG-13. STEVEN SODERBERGH's made-for-Netflix movie High Flying Bird (from a script by the playwright [...]

GLASS DIRECTED BY M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN. UNIVERSAL. R. IN HIS 2006 SUPERNATURAL melodrama Lady in the Water, M. Night Shyamalan cast himself as an author who receives a message from [...]

RUST CREEK DIRECTED BY JEN MCGOWAN. IFC MIDNIGHT. R. IN JEN McGOWAN'S Rust Creek, Hermione Corfield plays Sawyer, a college senior en route to an important job interview in D.C. [...]

THE BLISTERING drama Revolutionary Road has two big ideas: Suburbia suffocates the soul and Titanic sleeps with the fishes. The first idea was still subversive when Richard Yates published his [...]

It might seem specious to observe that New York actors seem more real than their West Coast counterparts. But look at them--the movie stars, the Broadway divas, the character oddballs, [...]

FOR THOSE OF US who gripe that modern sci-fi and fantasy films consist of actors emoting gamely opposite Players to be Animated Later, the prospect of the Wachowski brothers' Speed [...]

IN CRISTIAN MUNGIU'S 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, the camera fastens on a Romanian university student, Otilia (Anamaria Marinca), as she negotiates on behalf of her pretty, childlike [...]

Even in an awards season threatened by the writers' strike, actors and actresses will metamorphose into politicians, making happy talk at Hollywood house parties and showing off their ordinary-people-ness (and [...]

AS DANIEL PLAINVIEW, the monomaniacal oilman in Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis wears a thick, curly mustache, and his face is freakishly long and straight, like [...]

THE ARTISTS WHO ADAPTED Ian McEwan's devastating novel Atonement to the screen have done, by all objective measures, a sterling job of stuffing everything into their movie's two-hour frame: the [...]

IT'S NO WONDER that the fate of Chris McCandless ate into the minds of writer Jon Krakauer and filmmaker Sean Penn. The subject of the book and now the film [...]

SUPERBAD MIGHT BE the most provocative teen sex comedy ever made; it is certainly one of the most convulsively funny. Its protagonists are graduating high-school buddies swimming in hormones and [...]