The Mount Rushmore Society promises a “monumental night” when it rolls out the red carpet Thursday, Sept. 21, for the first of five annual Mon…
There is no nice or pretty way to tell a story about the systemic oppression and mistreatment of black people in the United States. It's fitti…
For Taylor Sheridan, the West is still alive with frontier tragedies and genre thrills, even if hopelessness has moved in and blanketed the land.
Ah, August. It's that time of year when you can head to your local multiplex to see Matthew McConaughey as an interplanetary David Copperfield…
Most artists don't get rich. Most won't become major pop culture phenomenons or reach millions of people. Most will create work that will be s…
Early in "20th Century Women," the third feature by writer-director Mike Mills, Dorothea (Annette Bening) remarks that she knows her teenage s…
The most frightening thing about "The Blackcoat's Daughter" isn't the intense violence late in the film, but rather the despondence from which…
"Ghost in the Shell" is 40% a modestly effective update of the iconic Japanese manga and anime series, 60% studio assembly-line product. One c…
Rule of thumb for monster movies: you can be dumb, or you can be cruel, but being both is where I draw the line. "Life," a mean-spirited, dim-…
"The Belko Experiment" is an odd beast: a horror film that tries to be both conventional gorehound bait and a grimmer, more confrontational mo…
The most iconic ape in movie history gets his least inspired major outing in "Kong: Skull Island." A Frankenstein's Monster of stitched togeth…
If the ad campaign for "Logan," the 10th film in the "X-Men" franchise, could be summed up in five words, it would likely be "not your daddy's…
"Get Out" opens with LaKeith Stanfield (of TV's "Atlanta") walking around suburbia at night, alone. A black man visiting a very white neighbor…
Sure to be one of the strangest major studio releases of the year, Gore Verbinski's "A Cure for Wellness" is as admirable as it is frustrating…
Keanu Reeves benefits from myth. Whether he's a goofy stoner projected across history ("Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure"), an everyman tu…
Fresh off the Weinstein Company assembly line comes "Lion," a gallingly simplistic adoption drama factory-designed to smooth out difficult rel…
There's a good movie hiding somewhere in "Jackie," the new film starring Natalie Portman as the grieving Jackie Kennedy in the aftermath of Pr…
From "The Sixth Sense" on, M. Night Shyamalan has been associated with his sometimes stunning, sometimes labored twist endings, but his films …
Chiron reveals very little about himself. He's wary by nature, seen often with bowed head and hunched shoulders. He's grown up in a place wher…
If nostalgia rules the day, Damien Chazelle's "La La Land" is likely to clean up during awards season. The film is a musical written for the s…
The greatest value of "Fences" is its bringing August Wilson's masterful play to a wider audience. Denzel Washington's role as a director and …
Perhaps appropriate for a tumultuous year, 2016's best films were filled with people struggling to find out where they stand in the world, som…
Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) looks like he hasn't smiled in ten years. A janitor working in Quincy, Mass., he goes about his day in ill temper…
Art as personal exorcism is common, but "Nocturnal Animals" has a fairly ingenious concept with which to process it. In his first film since t…
The task of adapting Philip Roth to the screen has felled many a filmmaker over the years, from Ernest Lehman ("Portnoy's Complaint") to Rober…
There's a fair chance that by the time this review runs, "Rules Don't Apply" will have left local theaters. Warren Beatty's first film since 2…
"The Edge of Seventeen" has been marketed as a film about teen angst and insecurity. It is that, in some sense, but it's also a look at deep-s…