Search for 2017

In recent years, some of the most outlandish and edgy movies have emerged from South Korea, where directors like Kim Ki-duk, Park Chan-wook, and Bong Joon-ho have challenged norms and defied conventions. The results, although not always succes...

True-life stories of heroism and sacrifice are commonplace; good movies about those stories aren’t. Only the Brave recounts the tale of The Granite Mountain Hotshots and the challenges they faced when fighting wildfires during the years leadi...

This character study compensates for certain narrative hiccups and a bland sense of time and place by offering an effective performance by Ben Kingsley to go along with a story that asks difficult questions and goes to places many similar film...

This is one sequel it’s a pleasure to review. Although not as fresh and lively as the first Paddington, the second feature based on the popular children’s book series by Michael Bond offers some of the best family entertainment outside an ...

Sally Potter’s quirky The Party owes a lot to a generation’s worth of French “gathering” films in which a bunch of characters come together for dinner (or something similar) and all hell breaks loose. Commonalities among these films in...

Since 1976, many rags-to-riches films have commonly been described as “Rocky with x”, where “x” represents the competition-related subject of the film (e.g., “baseball”, “karate”, “singing”). Few, however, have matched Rock...

Phantom Thread, Paul Thomas Anderson’s follow-up to 2014’s Inherent Vice, feels a little like a mash-up of Bergman and Hitchcock without the verve of the latter and the subtleties of the former. What begins as a stately costume drama set i...

Dead Men Tell No Tales is the fifth entry into a veteran franchise that may finally have run out of both ideas and box office clout. Concerning the latter, this movie isn’t expected to do the same kind of business as any of the previous Pira...