Maybe it’s encouraging, in a way, that an America in crisis struggles so mightily to make crowd-pleasing war movies. Whatever their politics, no studio exec today would let a wide-release desert-war drama come right out and say what even the GOP increasingly admits: that Iraq was a mistake, that Afghanistan has…

The day you first hear Chavela Vargas is the best day you’ll have that year. A majestic and inimitable performer, and a lesbian trailblazer of gender nonconformity, the Mexican chanteuse stripped ranchera music to its wounded heart, singing lovesick, masculine cowboy songs with a voice that holds hurting like liquor…

You’re right not to trust a film critic who calls a move stunning. But let me say this about Human Flow, the epic new documentary surveying the scope of the global refugee crisis, from Chinese artist/activist Ai Weiwei: It stunned me, in the truest sense of the word. Again and…

America may be crumbling, but here’s at least one truth that might be cheering: They’ve finally figured out biopics. Ever since Walk Hard kicked its ass, that hokiest, flabbiest, most hilariously reductive of movie genres has become, like horror, the rare one where the studios allow filmmakers to take risks,…

Spielberg premieres Oct. 7 on HBO. While the studios accuse critics and Rotten Tomatoes of killing the movie business, Steven Spielberg is happy to look right into the camera and say that Pauline Kael had his number. “She was right,” says the world’s most profitable director deep into Spielberg, Susan…

With its cast of Kate Winslet and Idris Elba, its original non-franchise source material, its adult concerns and utter lack of superheroics, Hany Abu-Assad’s The Mountain Between Us stands as the kind of movie that grown-ups I know often say they wish the studios would make — and then tend…

Even if it hadn’t been essentially lost, James Whale’s The Old Dark House (1932) wouldn’t ever have fit, exactly, on the Mount Rushmore of Universal’s horror greats: Frankenstein, that ol’ corpse’s wife, the Wolfman, Dracula and — since actually you can’t see him we can get away with five faces…

Still trudging through the blasted desertscape of the mind 33 years after Paris, Texas, Harry Dean Stanton hoofs along beneath the opening titles of Lucky, his richly aimless swan song, past cacti and scrub brush, the sparseness of the landscape suggesting something of the lead’s drift of mind. Stanton’s Lucky,…

Lording over the colonies is all bore and bother for the queen in Stephen Frears’ sumptuous yet centerless Victoria & Abdul. The film dramatizes Queen Victoria’s spirited friendship with Abdul Karim, a charming clerk from northern India who — in this telling — jolts the Empress of India from her…

Gerald’s Game premieres on Netflix on Sept. 29 One of the most hilarious things I’ve ever seen on television comes early in The Langoliers, a 1995 ABC miniseries adapted by Tom Holland from a Stephen King novella. It’s the one about a small group of travelers waking up on a…

Please accept what follows as a considered statement, arrived at through observation and experience, and not as film-review hype or boilerplate: Kate Mulleavy and Laura Mulleavy’s Woodshock is the rare drug movie that, as you watch it, if you surrender to it, stirs the sensations of having taken drugs. I’m…

There’s no delicate way to say this, so I’ll just spit it out. I spent the first 10 minutes of Stronger, David Gordon Green’s eventually potent drama of trauma and recovery, trying to work out whether star Jake Gyllenhaal was intending to suggest that the real-life Bostonian at the story’s…

Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! is so much movie that critics April Wolfe and Alan Scherstuhl have elected to sync up Pacific Rim-style to take it on. Warning: The discussion below delves right into what we might call spoilers if a movie like Mother! could be spoiled. Now let’s drift. April, Each…

Strong Island premieres on Netflix on Sept. 15 The tragic truth remains that all it takes in America for a white person to get away with killing a black person is for the white person to convince the right people — a judge, a jury, a prosecutor — of his…

Fire Chasers premieres Sept. 8 on Netflix The greatest surprise is the beauty. The gripping new Netflix documentary series Fire Chasers opens with visions of orange-and-black hell, of ash and apocalypse, of California homes and trees and horizons ablaze, of the sky itself now some jack-o’-lantern’s smile. The fire brightens…

Is there a more telling symptom of the sickness afflicting studio filmmaking right now than the fact that there aren’t more good Reese Witherspoon comedies out there? In eras past, a hit could be built more years than not around a star like her. Sunny yet tart, she’s a romantic…

In one sense, Steven Spielberg’s 1977 UFO bliss-out, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, is reprehensible. It is, after all, the story of a daydreamer dad (Richard Dreyfuss) who leaves his family for worlds unknown as he continually trades in one slender, luminous life companion for another: Teri Garr for…

Twin Peaks: The Return airs Sundays on Showtime Live long enough, and people may surprise you. The biggest pricks you grew up with — the bullies or blowhards or preening kings of the high school — grow up, too. Sometimes they even turn out all right. Sometimes they’re even stung,…

Here’s what Patrick Hughes’ The Hitman’s Bodyguard has going for it: It’s exactly the movie it promises to be, but more so. It’s more wild, more hilarious, more giddily irresponsible — it’s the hard R action comedy that kids sneaking into it might imagine it’s going to be, minus ’70s…

Here’s what you didn’t see if you aren’t from there. Here are the voices you didn’t hear if you didn’t go there. Here’s the pain you can’t fully comprehend if you’re white, as I am, if you’re just watching on TV, if life has taught you that just saying sir…

The Defenders premieres on Netflix on Aug. 18 Look, you don’t need to have watched Iron Fist to enjoy the brisk, brawling silliness of The Defenders, a team-up adventure that’s something like a surprising return on an investment you thought had soured. In fact, not knowing all the plot details…

Besides your discomfort, one effect of writer/director Justin Chon choosing the title Gook for his electric, impassioned second feature is a suggestion of definitiveness, a suggestion that, for better or worse, this isn’t just the story of its characters but that of a people. The film, a comic drama tinged…