To hell with postmodern irony. Here are two earnest movies with straight-arrow heroes: "The Martian," with Matt Damon, and "Bridge of Spies," with Tom Hanks.
What’s fairly new about 'Black Mass' is that this gangster story focuses more on the moral seduction and destruction of a lawman than on the downfall of a hood.
Set in bombed-out Berlin of 1945, Petzold's 'Phoenix' questions who was guilty, and of what, in the daily workings of the Holocaust—and will there be a reckoning?
In 'The End of the Tour,' James Ponsoldt addresses the life—and death—of David Foster Wallace, served as the Platonic ideal for a generation of younger writers.
You won't see a movie more carefully premeditated than Allen's latest, which is too much like a machine, its characters more like well-oiled gears than human beings.
The footage once used to exploit the Winehouse miseries have been carefully sequenced by director Asif Karpadia so that they bring her humanity home to the viewer.
Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson is the perfect hero in an epic account of an earthquake that ravages California; Bill Pohlad studies Brian Wilson’s musical perfectionism.
Alex Garland's "Ex Machina" is a deceptive movie about deceptions, most of all about the very human tendency to deceive oneself in order to feel needed.
Emma Thompson has descried fairy-tale possibilities in the facts of Effie Gray's story; Kenneth Branagh does moderately well with an expedient "Cinderella."
The resonances of "It Follows" are varied and strange, touching on subtexts sexual, ethical, and sociological. The horrors in " '71" are frightening for being true.
Feeling emotionally robust, moviegoer? You’d better be if you intend to see 'Leviathan,' the acclaimed Golden Globe winner and Oscar nominee for best foreign film.
Most biopics try to penetrate the mystery of what makes a great artist, but 'Mr. Turner' deliberately preserves that mystery, and seals it into our hearts and minds.
Clint Eastwood's 'American Sniper' has provoked criticism from both right and left. It's awash in patriotic spirit, it glorifies war. It's also a pretty bad movie.
'Selma' dramatizes one moment in the civil-rights movement when Martin Luther King, wracked by doubts and intimations of mortality, could have put his goals on hold.
One movie too obviously geared to celebrate a Triumph of the Human Spirit; another whose writing and acting skillfully adduce the nature of the hero's character.
Alejandro González Iñárritu has made something that looks and feels unique, with a cast that works with such ensemble perfection I hesitate to single anyone out.
"Rosewater"—set in an Iranian prison—is painful, poignant, at times funny and humanizing. "Nightcrawler"—a monster movie that wants to be a social indictment—isn't.
The reduction of character and motive to diagrammable banalities seems of a piece with this film’s lack of interest in creating anything resembling human emotion.
The obsession with time lies at the core of Linklater’s singular new film, 'Boyhood.' In a sense it is misleading to call it new, since work on it began in 2001.
Darren Aronofsky, a master of misery, is very much in his element in 'Noah' as he envisions the sinful self-destruction of nearly the whole damned human race.
The evangelistic fervor of its producers is evident throughout 'Son of God,' but so is bombastic filmmaking lacking in any nuance or freshness of approach.
Philip Seymour Hoffman had the greatest range of any character actor of his generation, and his filmography is stupendous in both its length and its variety.
'Her' focuses on emotional anxieties, asking what happens when companionship and intimacy itself are outsourced to a rapidly evolving machine. What happens to us?
No moviemaker since Sturges has made the din of recrimination as funny as Russell does in 'American Hustle,' while Scorcese dazzles though 'Wolf' goes nowhere.
