Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, written as an original screenplay by author J.K. Rowling, is an expansion of her Harry Potter universe, and a test: Without lovable, adolescent leads Harry, Hermione Grainger, and Ron Weasley, or the elaborate narrative backbone provided by Rowling’s novels, can the wizarding world…
Tom Ford has entirely overstuffed his nesting-doll domestic drama-cum-thriller Nocturnal Animals, and yet I spent much of the film worrying that it might not have a point. Its aesthetic footprint is huge, but its impact decidedly small scale. That’s not always a bad thing; there’s a perverse elegance to so…
Anna Biller’s ripe, vibrant The Love Witch is an act of reclamation — and love. In this out-of-time extravaganza of feminist-satanist serial-killer erotica, the writer/director/producer — plus editor and set and costume designer — has crafted the best kind of homage or parody, the kind that honors every thrill and…
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is a small film burdened with the epic, thanks to both its subject and its setting. Based on Ben Fountain’s 2012 novel, it depicts a day in the life of a young soldier (Joe Alwyn) briefly returning from Iraq to be honored with his squad…
The Amazon series Good Girls Revolt, centered on a landmark 1970 gender discrimination case at Newsweek, is the kind of period drama that’s more interested in commenting on the present than recreating the past. The storyline, about professional journalists, plays fast and loose with the facts, and creator Dana Calvo…
Ben Younger’s workmanlike but nevertheless rousing Bleed for This accomplishes something that’s a tall order for any boxing movie: It makes the inspirational training-montage sequences weird. Those are generally the most requisite and unexciting element of the genre, but Bleed for This freshens them thanks to the strange and disturbing…
Sure, teen comedies make stars of their leading ladies and fellas, but what about the authority figures? Eugene Levy’s nameless dad in American Pie is peripheral but memorable as a bumbly guiding force. Tina Fey’s Ms. Norbury in Mean Girls is a motherly but revelatory mess of a teacher. Harry…
Brazil might not want you to know it, but Aquarius is something special. Writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s follow-up to the similarly exceptional Neighboring Sounds was notably not chosen as its country’s submission to the Oscars this year, a decision that may or may not be linked to a protest the filmmakers lodged…
Dog Eat Dog is like nothing Paul Schrader has ever done before. The director of films as diverse as American Gigolo, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, Affliction and Blue Collar (and the screenwriter of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and The Last Temptation of Christ), Schrader is no stranger to…
One day, Denis Villeneuve will make a truly great movie. This is, apparently, a controversial opinion. Many out there feel strongly that the Canadian filmmaker has been leaping from triumph to triumph in recent years — with Sicario, Prisoners and Enemy under his belt — while some consider him a…
It’s impossible not to think of the T-Rex scene in Jurassic Park while watching Bryan Bertino’s chilling and succinctly titled The Monster. You remember: It’s dark, and the rains have started. The Jeeps have stalled en route to their destination. The kids are in one car, adults in the other,…
It’s fun watching Ginny Baker be rude to people. I was hesitant to give a chance to Pitch, the new Fox series imagining the life and career of the (fictional) first woman to play Major League Baseball, because I feared Ginny would be impossibly noble, driven and hardworking — the…
With films like Take Shelter, Mud and even this spring’s somewhat uneven Midnight Special, Jeff Nichols has steadily built a filmography of terse beauty. With Loving, he tackles the kind of boldface subject matter that Oscar season feeds on: It’s a historical drama about the 1967 Supreme Court decision that…
A question is posed to the main character of Barry Jenkins’ wondrous, superbly acted new film, Moonlight: “Who is you, man?” The beauty of Jenkins’ second feature, which follows his San Francisco–set black-boho romance Medicine for Melancholy (2008), radiates from the way that query is explored and answered: with specifics…
Haters Back Off!, a new eight-episode comedy streaming on Netflix, is about putting yourself out there, ignoring the haters, following your dreams no matter who or what stands in your way and utterly humiliating yourself on YouTube. Also at church socials, gay bars, funerals, rest homes — really anywhere Miranda…
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…
Netflix’s The Crown, a drama series about the life and times of Queen Elizabeth II, is the kind of sumptuous but tasteful British royals porn you’d expect from Ye Olde Masterpiece Theatre, not from the streaming giant that gave us BoJack Horseman and Stranger Things. A $130 million joint American/British…
“Are we really in our generation going to allow the biggest mammal on earth to disappear?” asks a conservationist late in Richard Ladkani and Kief Davidson’s propulsive ivory-trade doc. That simple question cuts to the heart in ways that much of this showy, desperately dramatic pseudo-thriller doesn’t. The title is…
A wall of white and black hats. Terrifying darkness. A woman staggering through a medical facility with her guts ripped open. And always, in the background: the player piano ticking along according to its programming, playing modern-day ballads to the denizens of a future world. Welcome to Westworld, a slick…
I’m not afraid to admit that I get a kick out of Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon thrillers. Yes, they’re indifferently plotted and predictably written. But I’m a sucker for ludicrous, centuries-spanning conspiracies and indulgent faux-gnosticism. The books serve, if nothing else, as gripping tours through art-world apocrypha, and Brown’s know-it-all…
Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge is a film at war with itself. Which makes perfect sense, because it’s about a man at war with himself, and I’m pretty sure it was also made by a man at war with himself. The true-life story of Desmond Doss — a Seventh Day Adventist…
Edward Bunker’s novel Dog Eat Dog (1996) kicks off with a disgusting sequence in which a two-bit criminal named Gerald “Mad Dog” McCain — caught up in a cocaine binge that Bunker describes in beat-by-beat detail across several pages — stabs his girlfriend and her daughter to death in a…
