Reviews
‘Voyagers’ Review
The director of "Limitless" and "Divergent" returns with a space-set riff on "Lord of the Flies" that does little to justify its cosmic surroundings.
‘Moffie’ Review
“Moffie” emerges not as a story centered on the dehumanization of Black South Africans during the apartheid era, but rather on the empathy-starved soil of military boot camp from which hatred so easily sprouted.
‘Slalom’ Review
Charléne Favier's frosty feature debut covers a broad canvas of emotional consequence via a small-scale, untraditional, ultimately devastating sports story.
‘Godzilla vs. Kong’ Review
“Godzilla vs. Kong” succeeds because it finds compromise between its foes’ enduring pop culture status and the technical calculations (and deep pockets) of modern Hollywood to turn that status into bracing spectacle.
‘Better Days’ Review
Hong Kong's Oscar contender navigates the degrees of dystopian separation between real-world issues and melodramatic fiction, to middling success.
‘Nobody’ Review
The sophomore feature from Ilya Naishuller confirms him as a filmmaker of the ferociously hardcore, leave-the-kids-at-home, make-you-wince-once-or-twice variety.
‘Come True’ Review
An intriguing but narratively self-defeating mash-up of “Stranger Things,” “Inception” and stark ‘80s paranoia, “Come True” – the second feature directorial effort from Anthony Scott Burns – puts a ghoulish spin on cinema’s defining ability to turn the audience into voyeurs.
‘The Inheritance’ Review
For the audience being invited into it, the space at the physical and spiritual center of “The Inheritance” feels somewhat suspended in time. Asili dispenses of any temptation of narrative urgency in favor of documentary-like vignettes that can shake off one aesthetic for another in any given moment.
‘The Father’ Review
Florian Zeller's confident film debut is an Oscar contender that creeps up to the line of horror and boasts some of Anthony Hopkins's finest on-screen moments.
'Boogie' Review
Eddie Huang's first feature effort attempts to put an intergenerational immigrant-story spin on your standard sports tale.
'Lucky' Review
Natasha Kermani's new movie has whiffs of belonging in the busy time-loop subgenre, but it turns those attributes into a commentary that's all its own.
‘Raya and the Last Dragon’ Review
Walt Disney Animation’s latest is its most action-packed entry since “Big Hero 6” and its most soulful since “Moana.”
‘Tom and Jerry’ Review
The 2021 revival is a strange and self-defeating movie, one that begins by flexing its pop culture awareness muscles before going on to show a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes Tom and Jerry so enduring and sadistically endearing.
‘Cherry’ Review
The Russo Brothers’ “Avengers: Endgame” encore finds them unburdened and ultimately undone by the air-tight calculations of that superhero enterprise (and perhaps providing clarity as to who the success of the Infinity Saga’s finale ultimately resides with).
‘I Care a Lot’ Review
An occasionally cunning, candy cane-sleek thriller that is far more interesting for where it arrives than how it arrives there, “I Care a Lot” is the kind of movie you come away from unable to reflect on the first 110 minutes because the last five are so ferocious in vying for the spotlight that we feel compelled to at least humor it.
‘Judas and the Black Messiah’ Review
If the story being told in Shaka King’s “Judas and the Black Messiah” – a mighty impressive sophomore feature chronicling the influence and 1969 police assassination of Chicago Black Panthers leader Fred Hampton when he was just 21 years old – was any weightier, it would threaten to burst out of the TV sets that most HBO Max subscribers will likely be watching the movie through upon its Friday arrival.
‘Land’ Review
The new drama “Land” finds the venerable Robin Wright boldly treading into unknown territory to contend with new challenges in more ways than one, and at the project’s center is a self-referential awareness that I’m sure its star must appreciate to a certain extent. Having spent the better part of the last half-decade popping up in high-profile blockbusters and helping to tug Netflix’s “House of Cards” across the finish line sans Spacey, “Land” sees the accomplished actress in the director’s chair of a feature film for the first time.
‘Sator’ Review
Writer-director Jordan Graham did much more than write and direct over the seven-year production of “Sator,” his effectively creepy and unexpectedly personal backwoods tale.
‘At the Ready’ Review (Sundance)
Politics, personal histories and border region complexities tangle in the new documentary from filmmaker and Texas journalist Maisie Crow.
‘The Blazing World’ Review (Sundance)
“The Blazing World” joins the hand-drawn counterculture fantasia of “Cryptozoo” and the nuclear-blasted dystopian rescue mission “Prisoners of the Ghostland” as a strong contender for the most WTF experience to be had at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.