Phones in serial killer movies are usually used by the deranged hunters to taunt the police or carefully tell victims how they’ll die. But in “The Black Phone” it’s the other way around, fitting for a horror-thriller that flips many of the genre’s formula.
The brief life of Elvis Presley is not something that fits neatly into a conventional biopic formula, though many have tried. It was, perhaps, always going to take a director as wild and visionary as Baz Luhrmann to do something that evokes the essence of the King’s 42 years.
It's boom times for googly eyes.
Within months of “Everything Everywhere All at Once," the metaphysical sci-fi comedy whose panoply of metaverses memorably included one that made magic out of a pair of stones and some plastic eyeballs, arrives “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On.”
Female desire is not a topic that gets a lot of space in mainstream Hollywood movies. And the desire of women north of 45? Well, that’s been almost exclusively the province of Nancy Meyers, Meryl Streep and Diane Keaton.
The glow sticks. The neon lanyards. DJs playing wildly inappropriate songs. The mocktails, the tipsy grown-ups, the awkward adolescent kisses in photo booths.
Finally, a feature film set on the suburban bar mitzvah party circuit.
“In 1995, Andy got a toy from his favorite movie. This is that movie.”
So begins “Lightyear,” a new Pixar release that takes a meta approach to the animation studio's flagship franchise.
George Saunders’ short story “Escape from Spiderhead” is not, you might say, an obviously cinematic piece. It’s the kind of subtly unsettling work — stark, moody and dialogue heavy — that could easily be a play or a haunting experimental film.
The enduring, collective love for “Jurassic Park” is immensely hard to explain. Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film implanted itself into our cultural consciousness as a kind of platonic ideal of a blockbuster.
By now you’d think you know what you’re getting with an Adam Sandler sports movie. “Happy Gilmore” and “The Waterboy” have conditioned us to expect silly voices and left hooks from irritated game show hosts.
Few documentaries looking at the past offer as real a vision of the future as “The Janes.”
Directors Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes have taken a look at a dozen or so women who came together in Chicago to secure abortions at a time when the procedure was illegal in most of the country.
Films like “It Follows” and “The Guest” have already made Maika Monroe something of a modern scream-queen with a feminist bent. But the psychological acuity and compelling vulnerability Monroe brings to Chloe Okuno’s lean, stylish thriller “Watcher" suggests that her maturing movie-star presence goes well beyond any particular genre.
As one of our most talented living actors on screen or stage, Mark Rylance certainly knows how to speak beautifully. But sometimes it seems the essence of his acting emerges in those blank seconds between words.
Pain is a essentially a thing of the past for some in David Cronenberg’s “ Crimes of the Future,” a dense, gorgeous and grotesque meditation on bodies, creation and art.
Fans of “Bob’s Burgers” will find a lot to savor in the long-awaited big screen adaptation of the Fox comedy about the oddball Belcher family. “ The Bob’s Burgers Movie ” feels very much like the quirky show — just on a supersized scale, which is all it needed to be.
One wedding and a funeral — and a birth. That gorgeous house, never mind the leaky roof. Some sunshine, too! More bone-dry quips from Maggie Smith. And oh, the clothes — silks and satins, tulles and tiaras.
Somewhere in the southwest of England is a sprawling stone estate nestled along hedge-lined lanes that you can rent, complete with wood fireplaces, low oak beams, an apple tree in the yard and a room for a baby grand piano.
If you must reboot an over 30-year-old Disney Channel cartoon like “ Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers,” you could do much worse than looking to “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” for inspiration.
When there are so many fictional, burly varieties of heroes so regularly on movie screens, it's jarring to see that the genuine article can be a humble, gaunt former traffic cop who believed in the power of talking.
For a movie about a girl with pyrokinetic powers, “ Firestarter ” is lacking a certain spark.
This new adaptation of Stephen King’s 1980 novel is not scary or thrilling, nor is it emotionally resonant or particularly moving.
Early on in “Top Gun: Maverick,” Tom Cruise hops on his sleek motorcycle, wearing Aviator sunglasses and a leather jacket with patches, and speeds into a time machine.
“On the Count of Three” is marketed as a “darkly comic” movie. Well, there's dark comedy and there’s darker comedy, and then there's comedy like this — so dark that you wonder if the two words can realistically co-exist in one sentence.
Once a superhero franchise goes multiverse, it’s hard to go back.
No work of fiction ever needs permission to break the rules or push the boundaries of traditional storytelling, but the multiverse, at least as it’s been served up in recent Marvel movies, practically demands it.
“Happening,” Audrey Diwan's Golden Lion-winner at last year's Venice Film Festival, is set in 1963 France but the period detail isn't prominent.
“Memory" is an interesting title for the latest Liam Neeson thriller. Do you remember the last Liam Neeson thriller? Or the one before that? Who was it that got took in that one? It began getting hard to tell these films from one another years ago, and yet they've kept coming.
If “ Petite Maman ” left you feeling a little too good about mothers, daughters and empathy, Finland may just have the antidote in Hanna Bergholm’s “ Hatching,” a chilling critique of perfectionism wrapped up in a gruesome body horror.
We first meet the intriguing heroine of “Anaïs in Love,” appropriately enough, when she's rushing. The opening scene of the French romantic comedy has her running down a Paris street with a bouquet of flowers.
If you’re gonna face a jury for a crime you’ve already confessed to — and even explained how you did it — you’d better have something going for you besides a “not guilty” plea.
The real-life character of Britain's Kempton Bunton, an amiable sexagenarian taxi driver who was acquitted of stealing a national art treasure in 1961, definitely did.
Céline Sciamma’s “ Petite Maman ” couldn’t be more different in scope and scale from “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.” There are no castles, or corsets or waves crashing up against craggy cliffs.
The first sign that not everyone in Robert Eggers' 10th-century Viking revenge tale “The Northman” has their priorities entirely straight comes early in the film, when the Viking king Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke) returns home to the North Atlantic kingdom of Hrafnsey after a year of fighting overseas.
Time always flew in J.K. Rowling's Wizarding World but it has lately seemed to catch up to the Potter pop cultural sensation. Those long lines outside bookstores are a long time ago now. The books stopped but the movies never did.
“ Navalny ” is so taut and suspenseful you’d think John le Carré had left behind a secret manuscript that’s only just coming to light now.
This Easter, Mark Wahlberg is offering us a gift as sweet as a box of Peeps or a chocolate rabbit — and just as nutritious.
“Father Stu” is a loving biopic of a one-time real-life hell-raising, blue-collar hustler who somehow becomes a white-collared Roman Catholic priest.
The fact that “ Sonic the Hedgehog 2 ” exists is not exactly a mystery.
The first film was a financial success for Paramount Pictures and by the year’s end would hold the distinction of being the No.
The human voice, a necessity in virtually any film, is barely existent and wholly secondary in “COW.” We hear only random bits of conversation, muffled and unimportant, from people we don’t know and don’t need to.
Of all the many things that go fast in Michael Bay's pedal-to-the-metal retro action thriller “Ambulance” — the speeding EMS van, the army of police cars trailing it, Bay's ever-swooping, whooshing camera — nothing goes by in more of a blur than the exposition.
Maybe it's a counter-reaction to our increasingly digital reality, but lately horror films have increasingly turned to primal pasts to resurrect the rituals and fears of folktale.
It's a strikingly global trend, spanning puritan New England ("The Witch"), rural Iceland (“Lamb”), North Dublin ("You Are Not My Mother") and pagan cults of Sweden ("Midsommar").
The latest hero from Marvel is hard to explain. He's a man and yet also a bat. No, not Batman. Let me try again: He's a daywalking vampire, but, no, not that cool cat Blade. This guy is good but also very bad.
The geniuses at NASA accidentally build the lunar module a little too small for an adult in “Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood.” In Richard Linklater’s first foray into animation since “A Scanner Darkly,” a few fast-talking NASA men (Glen Powell and Zachary Levi) recruit an average local elementary school student, Stan, to test it out for them on a top secret mission to the Moon.
“Everything Everywhere All at Once” is your standard multiverse martial arts movie about filing your taxes and midlife regret in which googly eyes, everything bagels and fanny packs play vital supporting roles and portals to parallel existences are opened not with a spell but with butt plugs and paper cuts.
“The Lost City” is the kind of charming, star-driven, action-adventure that makes moviemaking look easy and effortless from the outside. It’s hard to imagine a world in which you pair Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum as a romance novelist and her himbo cover model on a “Romancing the Stone”-esque journey not being enjoyable.
History is factual. History is chronological. History is linear. But memory? Memory is none of those things.
Memory is selective, memory is jumbled, memory travels in different directions. And so does “Mothering Sunday,” Eva Husson’s affecting and visually pleasing — if languorous — meditation on love and loss, based on a woman’s memory of an impactful day that reverberates through her long life.
You want ghosts? Check. How about doors inexplicably opening and closing, creepy moaning in dark corners, and sudden sickening swarms of maggots? Check, check and check.
In Houston 1979, a small film crew arrives to make a porn film in a rented cottage on a farm belonging to an aged couple, one of whom greets the producer at the door with a shotgun and — unaware of their cinematic ambitions — an order for “discretion.” What could possibly go wrong?
Meet Vic and Melinda Van Allen, the yin and yang of the country club circuit. He likes to brood; she likes to dance. He's a teetotaler; she's a lush. He rather likes monogamy; she likes to nuzzle other men in front of her husband.
Pathos and action are found in equal parts in “ The Adam Project,” the latest attempt by Netflix to create the kind of throwback blockbuster that you might have paid to see in movie theaters.
For better and worse, “Turning Red” is like no Pixar film before it.
The film, directed by Domee Shi, who made the lovely Oscar-winning short “Bao,” is the first Pixar movie directly solely by a woman.
A boy sees a pretty girl at a party and delivers a pick-up line for the ages. “If you don’t have anything to do tonight, how would you like to learn how to do the rhumba?” he asks. The girl is charmed.
The two features by the South Korean-born filmmaker and video essayist Kogonada – his auspicious debut “Columbus” and the new “After Yang” – are distinct for their richness in rare qualities.