One of the quiet triumphs of James Gray's The Lost City of Z is how it posits artillery officer, archaeologist, and explorer Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam)—who disappeared along with his son, Jack (Tom Holland), in 1925 while searching for a fabled civilization in the Amazon rainforest—as a kindred spirit of …
Lee Grant, actress, director and trailblazer for nearly 70 years, remembers her breakthrough. It was 1949, and she was offered a Broadway role as the pretty ingenue lead in a naturalistic cop drama, “Detective Story.” As she sits in her kitchen in Manhattan, Grant recalls her response to the chance …
Each new film that Terrence Malick, the once notoriously unhurried director, has made in the rash of projects since The Tree of Life (2011) evinces a further regression, an increasingly witless sacralizing of male-female coupledom. The title of Malick’s latest, Song to Song, set in Austin against the backdrop of …
In theory, Fifty Shades Darker is great no matter how bad it is. To call it a lousy movie is missing the point: It’s a functional movie, a girls-night-out commando mission whose job is to get in, get out, and get the job done in between. And depending on what …
Martin Scorsese has evidently waited his entire life to direct a saga of martyrdom and Judas-like betrayal on the scale of Silence, his stark, portentous adaptation of Shusaku Endo’s novel about Portuguese Catholic priests who get put through the wringer (along with their native followers) in 17th-century Japan. The movie …
Filmmaker Pablo Larraín’s international reputation rests on a decade-long run of films prodding at the bugaboos haunting the collective historical imagination of his native Chile. Despite a proclivity for some formal unorthodoxies—shooting on vintage videotape in order to evoke the milieu of late 1980s television in No (2012), for example—Larraín …
Through absolutely no fault of his own, Warren Beatty was born to be one of the handsomest men on Earth. Everybody has to play the hand he’s dealt, even if it’s the five aces that have, for Beatty, given him the air of adorable puzzlement he has been deploying for …
She is of royal blood. She has an overprotective father. She has an animal sidekick—two, actually—and a personal dream she needs to fulfill, no matter how many people tell her she can’t. Yeah, she’s a Disney princess, all right. Except Moana is the daughter of a Polynesian chieftain. And her …
Manchester by the Sea, about a self-punishing, depressive loner (Casey Affleck) who slowly comes back to life after enduring a series of brutal losses, is the funniest movie about grief ever made. But that’s far from the only remarkable thing about it. This film by playwright turned filmmaker Kenneth Lonergan …
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 pretentious, emotionally manipulative charlatan. …