Arts & Culture

Pablo Larraín is having a good year. The Chilean director, Oscar-nominated a few years ago for his 2012 political drama No, has just released Jackie, featuring a striking Natalie Portman as Jackie Kennedy in the immediate aftermath of her husband’s assassination. He is also about to release Neruda, a complex,…

In a profile early this year, the novelist Dana Spiotta told the New York Times, “That’s seductive, being paid attention to.” Several of the films below — those that seduced me — feature pivotal scenes, whether in diners, at picnic tables or at kitchen tables, of one character raptly listening…

I was fortunate enough this year to be at both Sundance and Cannes, so it was something like agony for me to watch the litany of critics and commentators who spent the summer and early fall complaining about the year in film — all while movies such as Manchester by…

In this, the harrowing year of 2016, I could jump into the Oscars talk. I could pick groundbreaking films that reminded me time and again that movies are alive and more vital than ever, like the heartbreaking Moonlight, the soul-stirring Queen of Katwe, the force-of-goodness 13th, the subtle and sweet…

Controversial opinion: Lists are a great way to both organize and digest horrifically large amounts of information. And they’ve never been more relevant than this, the Lord’s year, 2016, in television. There’s just too damn much, and nobody could possibly watch it all — except maybe Scott Bakula on a…

Whenever I tell someone I’ve been binging on Hallmark Christmas movies all day, there’s a certain amount of apology involved. “I know, they’re the worst,” I’ll concede, before the other person has had a chance to say anything. “The one I watched this morning was a real winner.” Usually whomever…

The first thing to say about Rogue One is that it might be the most visually splendid Star Wars movie to date — with its mist-covered mountains, its tsunamis of dust and fire, its X-wing fighters blazing through rainswept nights. I’ve never been a big fan of director Gareth Edwards…

Here’s a promise few movies can make. If you sink two hours into Collateral Beauty now, it’s guaranteed that for the rest of your life, when conversation stalls, you can save the night by asking, “Did you ever see that movie where Will Smith plays an ad executive so shut…

One reason why Isabelle Huppert makes suffering so compelling onscreen is her sheer … well, “unflappability” isn’t quite the right word. It’s a kind of ironic distance, perhaps: The actress can convey curiosity, bewilderment and coolness all at once, even as she deals with the most agonizing of circumstances. But…

The cussedness of La La Land is almost enough to recommend it. Damien Chazelle’s sumptuous tribute to romantics trying to keep lit the fire of a guttering culture is defiantly old-fashioned in form and style. It is, among other things, a throwback to the great MGM musicals of the Gene…

Incorporated comes on like the kind of TV show you think you have to pay close attention to. There’s more consideration of climate change in the tense Syfy dystopian thriller than in all four-and-a-half hours of this fall’s presidential debates. As the series opens, stern white titles on a black…

It’s December, which means it’s time to curl up in front of the TV in a fetal position and pray for 2017. Since this year has been Satan’s masturbatory fantasy, we deserve to glue our eyelids open and soak in the sweet, sweet escapism. And on January 1st, fortified by…

In October, 200 coffee shops across the United States and Canada were made into Luke’s Diner for a day to promote the new revival of Gilmore Girls. No special signings or souvenirs — just the regular drink in a commemorative sleeve, served by the usual barista in a branded apron,…

Look, Shia LaBeouf was approximately the 27th worst thing in that last Indiana Jones movie, and his intense-yet-distracted turns in the Transformers series aren’t legit strikes against him. Would you have turned down all that money to be posed by Michael Bay for a couple months every few years? Now,…

Eventually, there will be so many films about a sullen or damaged man returning to his provincial town to face the demons of his past that Netflix will make a separate category for them. At their worst, these movies are navel-gazing vanity projects for their writers and directors (Cameron Crowe,…

Miss Sloane opens with a clever gambit: Jessica Chastain’s face fills the screen in a tight close-up as she talks about strategy, breaking the fourth wall. From its opening minutes, the audience is put at the mercy of a charismatic figure and forced to piece together what she might represent…

Alia Shawkat’s great comic skill is for the continually fresh expression of a determined disgust. That eager face of hers, beneath its constellations of freckles and her great Harpo-frizzed curls, is forever souring up with disappointment, even as her characters strive not to let this on. To feel let down…

When last we saw Howard Hughes onscreen, Leonardo DiCaprio was repeating “the way of the future” ad infinitum as he gazed into the mirror. Warren Beatty’s long-in-the-making Rules Don’t Apply isn’t nearly as concerned with the future as Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator was, looking instead to the past and all…

Outside of dudes killing dudes, there’s little the moviegoers seem to love more than weddings, a truth that Elite Zexer’s heartsick desert drama Sand Storm exploits for a first-act sucker punch. The nuptials that teen Layla (Lamis Ammar) is driving her father Suliman (Hitham Omari) toward, the frame of a…

As Allied opens, Brad Pitt parachutes so gently and quietly onto a stretch of Moroccan desert that at first you think he might be dead. And maybe he sort of is — maybe he has to be. Pitt’s Max Vatan is a pinched, terse figure in the first act of…