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Friday, Apr. 12, 2024
Review: "Food, Inc. 2" From Directors Robert Kenner and Melissa Robledo
The makers of the influential 2008 documentary "Food, Inc." never planned to make a sequel. They figured they'd said it all in their harrowing look at a broken, unsustainable food system — a system led, they argued, by a few multinational corporations whose monopoly squeezes out local farmers,...
Tuesday, Apr. 9, 2024
Review: Writer-Director Alex Garland's "Civil War"
The United States is crumbling in Alex Garland's sharp new film "Civil War," a bellowing and haunting big screen experience. The country has been at war with itself for years by the time we're invited in, through the gaze of a few journalists documenting the chaos on the front lines and chasing an...
Thursday, Apr. 4, 2024
Review: Director Ken Loach's "The Old Oak"
In so many ways, TJ Ballantyne is a classic Ken Loach hero: a working-class, middle-aged man trying to simply eke out a dignified living, but meeting obstacles at each turn — a victim of unforgiving social realities that leave people like him in the dust. Like many of these Loach protagonists, TJ...
Wednesday, Apr. 3, 2024
Review: Dev Patel Makes Directorial Debut With "Monkey Man"
Has there been a more satisfying actor to watch mature on screen in recent years than Dev Patel? The endearingly earnest, scrawny kid of "Slumdog Millionaire" has steadily grown into a singularly intense and sensitive leading man. It's a transformation that, for anyone who missed "Lion,""The...
Wednesday, Apr. 3, 2024
Review: Writer-Director Goran Stolevski's "Housekeeping for Beginners"
"Housekeeping for Beginners" begins with a shot of a painting on a wall hanging just a little askew. It's an apt metaphor for what's in store. Writer and director Goran Stolevski gives us an atypical family portrait that's brilliantly political without being preachy, loving without being maudlin...
Thursday, Mar. 28, 2024
Review: Alice Rohrwacher's "La Chimera"
When we talk about "movie magic," the first thing that comes to mind is often something like the bikes achieving liftoff in "E.T." But it applies no less to Alice Rohrwacher's wondrous "La Chimera," a grubbily transcendent folk tale of a film that finds its enchantment buried in the ground. "Were...
Tuesday, Mar. 26, 2024
Review: Director Thea Sharrock's "The Beautiful Game" Starring Bill Nighy and Micheal Ward
"The Beautiful Game," a new movie starring Bill Nighy and Micheal Ward, is about a real international soccer tournament called the Homeless World Cup. Don't go in expecting documentary realness or grit, however. This is a movie-movie (debuting on Netflix on Friday, tidily constructed to leave...
Thursday, Mar. 21, 2024
Review: Director Gil Kenan's "Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire"
Forty years after "Ghostbusters" and following a string of sequels that never measured up to the 1984 original — beginning all the way back with 1989's "Ghostbusters II" — it's fair to wonder, well, who else ought we to call? It may be time to, if not give up the ghost entirely, at least give a...
Wednesday, Mar. 20, 2024
Review: Director Michael Mohan's "Immaculate" Starring Sydney Sweeney
It's not your imagination: Sydney Sweeney is everywhere. In the past four months, she's been in a romantic comedy that turned into a sleeper hit, a superhero movie that didn't and, as of this weekend, a bloody horror. Results have varied, quality-wise, but for someone the culture seems to want to (...
Tuesday, Mar. 19, 2024
Review: Director Doug Liman's "Road House" Starring Jake Gyllenhaal
Elwood P. Dalton is a classy sort of bouncer. While five tough guys circle him outside a bar looking to bash his skull in, he has a question for them: "Before we start, do you have insurance?" And after savagely beating each up, he kindly drives them to the hospital. Dalton — played by a muscular...