.Movies

Stripped to its bare essentials, Breaking is a chamber piece. An extremely tense one—botched daylight bank robbery, hostages, police snipers closing in, the lone bank robber growing increasingly unglued. Only four main characters are involved: the armed...

If it’s accurate to suggest that the chief business of most mainstream narrative movies is to provide happy endings and that documentaries own the license to make an audience agitated, worried or depressed, then the documentary Free...

Jordan Peele’s NOPE opens with a chimpanzee wearing one of those outfits that barely contained Gene Kelly’s biceps in An American in Paris (1951). Unlike Kelly, Gordy the chimpanzee doesn’t dance across a movie screen awash in...

A few of us have known someone like Emily, the protagonist of Emily the Criminal—usually for a very short time. That’s because our heroine, played in the key of B-So-What by Aubrey Plaza,  operates on the slippery...

Let’s talk about Lena Dunham. Tiny Furniture (2010)---which she wrote, directed and starred in—set the bar for ultra-indie explorations of the lives of women, Millennial-style. In it, she portrays a recent college graduate who has moved back...

It’s a shame we don’t have more sharp-fanged communications-biz character studies like Quinn Shephard’s Not Okay. Too many would-be satires aim for easy political targets and end up ignoring the most despicable wrong-doings—for instance, social media. Writer-director...

When it comes to curious mental games that critics sometimes play, one of the most entertaining is “Make It French.” It works like this: In the midst of watching an ordinary, insipid American-made romantic comedy, the viewer...