Movies starring Willem Dafoe

With so much talent involved - both in front of and behind the camera - one has a right to anticipate something special from Inside Man. Does it deliver? Spike Lee's latest joint is a workmanlike thriller that provides solid performances; a mixtur...

John Wick is a rousing action thriller of the sort rarely encountered in theaters these days. The once popular genre, which was headlined by the likes of Stallone and Schwarzenegger during its heyday, has been a dying breed during the past two deca...

To date, The Favourite ranks as the nearest Yorgos Lanthimos has come to making something easily accessible to mainstream movie-goers. Poor Things comes in a close second, despite its Frankenstein­-inspired weirdness. But, with Kinds of Kindness,...

The Lighthouse starts out as a moody, introspective exploration of loneliness and interpersonal communication and develops into an existential horror movie. Although I don’t think the ending quite works, the film grows more unsettling as it ...

Let me start with a few brief editorial comments about Lars von Trier. Key to understanding my views about Manderlay is my disclosure of a belief that in order to be able to criticize something, you have to have first-hand familiarity with it. Vo...

Like most Agatha Christie stories, Murder on the Orient Express is all about the “whodunnit?” Once that question has been answered, there’s little reason to revisit the story. Christie never cared much about character development and her ...

Guillermo del Toro has taken us down some dark paths before, but this is the deepest and darkest he has gone, adapting the 1946 novel of the same name by William Lindsay Gresham (which was previously made into a movie in 1947). Set during the Grea...

The Northman is Hamlet. Or at least both were derived from the same source material, a Norse legend set in the early 900s about the revenge of a prince upon the uncle who murdered his father and wed his mother. However, while there was a surfeit o...

A loose adaptation of F.W. Murnau’s classic 1922 silent filmof the same name, Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu returns the vampire to its original designation as a creature of death rather than a tragic, romantic figure. The emasculated Dracula has bee...

Nymphomaniac Volume II, the continuation of the story begun by writer/director Lars von Trier in Nymphomaniac Volume I, is a clear case of a narrative running out of steam. Exhaustingly repetitive, this movie attempts many of the same things its pr...