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“Enjoy handmade art before it’s gone forever.” Keen-eyed viewers may read these words fleetingly on screen in the early stages of “Wildwood,” amid a wealth of fast-passing sights and sight gags as its young heroine cycles furiously through the homey, bustling streets of Portland, Oregon. Printed on a sign next to the craggly wares of […]
The sophomore feature from Hirokazu Kore-eda protégé Nanako Hirose, “Between Two Lovers” tackles a variety of potential hot-button issues, from polyamorous relationships to same-sex parenting, in its contemporary Japanese setting. The film stars Masami Nagasawa as a free-spirited children’s author who invites her doting husband and secret girlfriend to enter into a three-way relationship of […]
“Midday Meal” isn’t necessarily about the art of cooking, but it is in part about the rituals of food, rituals which become more precious with scarcity. But more than that, the new film from director Majid Majidi — best known for his 1997 drama “Children of Heaven”, the first Iranian production ever nominated for the […]
The most moving scene in “The First Taste of Loneliness” is not, in fact, its most tear-streaked. Gu You’s heartfelt family portrait opens on an extended, anguished scene of three women — a mother, her daughter and her granddaughter — keeping vigil at the bedside of their beloved husband, father and grandfather as his longtime […]
The fraught relationship between an estranged mother and daughter takes centre stage in “Ibuku,” the fourth film from Indonesian writer-director Eddie Cahyono. Despite the first-person perspective of the title — which translates as “my mother” in Indonesian — most of the film is seen through the eyes of Sumiati (Christine Hakim), a mother and recent […]
"Tenzing" earns its inspirational fervor, but the reason it fits into the new wave of mountain-climbing movies is that the director, Jennifer Peedom, an Australian who’s been making documentaries about mountain-climbing for 18 years, has staged the film with a you-are-there authenticity that’s breathtaking but never showy. She’s a classicist; this is a movie that, in spirit, you could imagine John Huston or Howard Hawks having directed.
“Welcome to the future,” we hear several times in “Ray Gunn” — not that the brave new world it presents is all that welcoming. Or, for that matter, particularly brave or new. The good news is we finally have flying cars and superpowered jetpacks; in other respects, though, we haven’t come a long way at […]
The movie, I’m pleased to report, exerts the same kind of historical/topical force that "13th" did. DuVernay, while she works in an extremely accessible and mainstream way, has a singular gift for making the nuances of history come alive. "14th" is steeped in history, but it’s not a dry lecture. Instead, DuVernay cuts through the dusty complacency with which we tend to regard the Constitution (just hearing that word can make you feel like you’re back in school) and shows you that the Constitution is a living, breathing document, one that we fail to heed at our peril. Which is more or less what
There have been many innovative R&B albums made over the past decade, but few have meshed futurism and tradition in quite the way that Danielle Ponder does on her second full-length, “Everything Has Changed.” She possesses a glass-shatteredly powerful, church-reared soul shouter voice, but uses its power sparingly, moving between it, a mid-range alto and […]
Ahead of his third album, 2023’s “Something to Give Each Other,” Troye Sivan teased the era as a dance-pop fantasia with singles “Rush” and “Got Me Started.” It was his post-pandemic record, one that promised to capture the crackle of electricity that came with no longer being on lockdown, finally free to connect with others. […]
This summer, the Avatar franchise reintroduced itself by revisiting its most iconic character: Aang, the namesake of “Avatar: The Last Airbender” and the original protagonist of a story now in its third decade. For its next act, the Avatar Studios imprint — overseen by original series creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko and tasked […]
If you enjoyed watching the trailer for “Other Mommy” during every multiplex outing this summer, you’ll get an extended dose of its freneticism during the actual film — right down to an opening title card that appears letter-by-letter while intercut with choppy action. From director Rob Savage, and adapted from the horror novel “Incidents Around […]
It’s for the best that “Animals,” actor Ben Affleck’s sixth outing behind the camera, is being released directly to Netflix — not that this slick, pacy serving of all-star pulp couldn’t or wouldn’t hold one’s attention in the multiplex. But ever since Affleck’s rousing, enjoyable political drama “Argo” won a Best Picture Oscar that it […]
Inevitably the Angel media company and streaming platform, rebranded from Angel Studios in 2025, has remade the 1947 John Wayne project “Angel and the Badman,” and not just for the angelic title. It’s actually the third iteration; a 2009 Hallmark Channel adaptation, shot in wintry British Columbia instead of the dusty, sandy American West, starred […]
On its face, the CBS drama “Cupertino” is a reversion to type for creators Robert and Michelle King. After dipping a toe into the supernatural with “Evil,” a kind of “X-Files” riff set inside the Catholic Church, the married couple behind “The Good Wife” and “The Good Fight” are back on factual terra firma with […]
The oceans’ vastness can feel ominous, and though scientists have studied what lurks beneath, so much remains unknown. In Netflix’s new limited series “Below,” creator Jesse McKeown introduces viewers to a tiny town in the Canadian province of Newfoundland, a man still haunted by his past and a family desperate to look ahead toward the […]
When do trimmings become the main course? Or, to pose it in employment terms: When does a side hustle became the real hustle? And can that just go down without a hitch? These are just ways into trying to think about developments in the career of Hayley Williams, who easily sold out two shows this […]
We’re used to films about hope and rejuvenation in the final days of the Second World War, but there’s a more novel perspective to be found in “Krux” — set in an isolated village in northeast Germany, where many of the locals have been so brainwashed by Nazism that the end of the war may […]
Amex GBT may be a software, payments and meetings company for business travel, but it’s also selling trust — and its chief privacy officer said that’s what it built its AI governance around.
The opening minutes of Renny Harlin’s “The Beast” are some of the goofiest we’ve seen on screen in 2026 — and coming a week after both “Digger” and “Verity,” that’s saying something. The latest from this prolific purveyor of schlock features a typically jocular, ornery Samuel L. Jackson navigating a high-tech automobile (the Beast of […]
