Like its subject, the man who took McDonald’s from a single burger shop to a globe-straddling child-fattener, John Lee Hancock’s The Founder can’t stop selling. The first fast-food kitchen, set up in 1953 by the solemn McDonald brothers in San Bernardino, gets celebrated here as rousingly as John Glenn’s first…
One of the quasi-bohemians in Mike Mills’ gauzy 20th Century Women loves to document ephemera, taking photos of everything she owns. A similar instinct — archiving as art — guides Mills’ movie itself, a trip back in time in which era-specific talismans substitute for genuine thought. Though big feels glut…
Maybe it’s a just a sign of the Blumhouse-era horror-movie world we find ourselves in, but there’s something refreshing about a scare flick that (a) actually shows you its monster occasionally and (b) gives you a definite reason to be afraid of it. Hiding things in shadows to enhance audience…
It’s a question the movies ask again and again: How should a person grieve? In Annie J. Howell and Lisa Robinson’s slow-burn pseudo-mystery Claire in Motion, a talented mathematics professor named Claire Hunger (Betsy Brandt) realizes her amateur survivalist husband Paul (Chris Beetem) might not be coming home from his…
For better and for worse, Peter Berg has found his genre. After oscillating between sports (Friday Night Lights), superheroes (Hancock) and even board games (Battleship) without much distinction, the writer, director, producer and actor has made a loose trilogy in which Mark Wahlberg reenacts recent tales of American heroism. Lone…
Somewhere inside the 128-minute Live by Night is a reasonably solid 168-minute movie struggling to get out. No, that’s not a typo: You can sense the contours of an absorbing story as writer/director/star Ben Affleck’s slapdash and fragmented assemblage limps along. Most of the pieces are there, but they remain…
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…
Art fairs in South Florida are nothing new. But an art fair where both the art and the venue are for sale? That’s the concept of Art Fort Lauderdale, a four-day fair calling itself “the ultimate open house,” merging the worlds of art collection and real estate.
Parents be warned: J. A. Bayona and Patrick Ness’ kid-meets-beast coming-of-age fantasy is a reclamation of fairy stories from the reassuring fiction of happily ever after. In a lineup of holiday releases — or, soon, a streaming queue — this tale of a bullied Irish boy whose best friend is…
Both a film noir and a candy-colored confection, Pedro Almodóvar’s Julieta is one of the most absorbing films he’s made in years. It’s also, perhaps, one of the saddest: Its bright hues and vivid textures offset a deep, unshakable melancholy. Based on a trio of Alice Munro short stories, Julieta…
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…
“These are the images that have marked me and leave me wondering still.” That’s how Kirsten Johnson prefaces Cameraperson, made up of footage she has collected over 25 years of working as a camera operator, cinematographer and director on dozens of different documentaries — films like Laura Poitras’ The Oath…
Words can’t do justice to the singular power of Keith Maitland’s documentary Tower, a you-are-there reconstruction of the harrowing 1966 mass shooting at the University of Texas at Austin, where 25-year-old former Marine and engineering student Charles Whitman planted himself in the school’s clock tower and shot 49 people, killing…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
In the pantheon of American First Ladies, Jacqueline Kennedy was no Eleanor Roosevelt. She didn’t push for policy, didn’t relinquish her pillbox hat to walk among the needy, didn’t travel to foreign countries as an ambassador and certainly didn’t advise her husband on matters of war. Jackie Kennedy’s role was…
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…
