Shallow script still delivers classic action adventure
The best thing “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom” has going for it is director J.A. Bayona, who takes a mediocre script by Derek Connolly and Colin Trevorrow and directs the living daylights out of it. This installment may have merely shallow ideas, but it’s easy to
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Fred Rogers documentary an emotional tonic for troubled times
In the deftly crafted documentary “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” Academy Award-winning filmmaker Morgan Neville (“20 Feet From Stardom”) manages to make the mild-mannered Fred Rogers look downright revolutionary. This probing documentary takes us beyond the set of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” The PBS show raised
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It’s been 14 years since the premiere of Brad Bird’s beloved animated superhero film, “The Incredibles,” one of the mega-hit Pixar films that cemented the animation studio’s reputation. Happily, Bird has pulled it off again, in the long-awaited sequel “Incredibles 2,” which is as good,
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Gangster movies are an incredibly useful media artifact for examining the fraught relationship between historically marginalized groups and the myth of the American dream. 1972’s super cool blaxploitation picture “Super Fly” was a groundbreaking entry into the gangster genre, a bold depiction lionizing the life
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Female heist movie is an empowering, cheeky comedy
“Ocean’s 8” is a dutiful (if, at times, also cheeky) heir to the heist franchise that began in 2001 with Steven Soderbergh’s reboot of the original “Ocean’s 11,” a suave exemplar of a male-dominated lineage that runs from the noirish “Rififi” (1955) to last year’s
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Subtle, elemental and powerfully beautiful, writer-director Chloe Zhao’s “The Rider” is the Western of the new century and the most enveloping film experience I’ve had this year. Even a hack director could make something of the southwestern South Dakota landscapes near Wounded Knee, lined by
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Director Ron Howard has entered the “Star Wars” universe with “Solo: A Star Wars Story.” Midshoot, the Hollywood veteran replaced directors Chris Lord and Phil Miller, whose penchant for improvisation didn’t go down well with the franchise overlords. The switch worked. Howard’s style has the
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The most impressive superpower in “Deadpool 2” is the movie’s ability to be deeply cynical and consistently self-referential and meta-on-top-of-meta with all its clever quips and winking asides … and yet still have us caring about these characters. We genuinely root for Wade Wilson/Deadpool (Ryan
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The notion of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the diminutive and soft-spoken Supreme Court justice, as a judicial “rock star” — at least in the eyes of progressives who love her sharply worded dissents to opinions rendered by the increasingly conservative court — may seem a strange
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Slapstick college comedy offers likable cast and cheerful goofiness
Absolutely zero new ground is broken in “Life of the Party,” a slapstick college comedy with PG-13 hijinks that include booze-soaked frat parties, mean girls getting their comeuppance, a couple having sex in the school library, a group of characters eating chocolate that turns out
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What does Thanos want? That question lies at the heart of “Avengers: Infinity War,” the at-once dark, maddeningly open-ended yet fiercely entertaining new chapter in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). This film pits the titular global do-gooders — still scattered after their 2016 falling-out with
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In the neatly spun and well-crafted supernatural thriller “A Quiet Place,” the humans don’t have to worry about the slimy, creepy, lizard-like creatures seeing them, because these particular monsters are literally blind. Problem is, if you create a noise — from knocking over an object
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Ava DuVernay’s “A Wrinkle in Time” is a landmark film even before it hits the theaters. The adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s eerie, mystical young adult sci-fi novel from 1962 was budgeted at over $100 million, the largest budget a woman of color has been handed
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