Movie Reviews
Kevin Hart: What Now?
"Kevin Hart: What Now?" is the comedian's fifth stand-up film since 2009 (the third to be released theatrically), comprising a total of around 6 1/2 hours of stage time. That's an extraordinary amount of new material for one comedian (there's no over...
The Birth of a Nation
The greatest accomplishment of Nate Parker's "The Birth of a Nation" might be reclaiming that title from the important and influential but irredeemably racist "Birth of a Nation" released 101 years earlier. That "Birth" said blacks and whites could n...
The Girl on the Train
"The Girl on the Train" is feel-bad misery porn that desperately wants to be "Gone Girl" but lacks that story's surprises and cathartic, twisted resolution. Based on Paula Hawkins' bestselling novel and directed by Tate Taylor ("The Help"), this drea...
Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life
As preteen fare goes, "Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life" is better than its bland, glib title, with some heart and soul beneath its pour-paint-on-the-principal shenanigans. Amid the cliches, it manages a neat trick or two.
Rafe (Griffin G...
The Greasy Strangler
The makers of "The Greasy Strangler" won't be offended when I say that it's not a film so much as an endurance test, an intentionally off-putting anti-comedy meant to try the patience even of people who like this sort of thing. It's about Big Ronnie ...
Deepwater Horizon
This week's dramatization of a recent disaster is "Deepwater Horizon," in which director Peter Berg ("Lone Survivor," "Battleship") tells how the offshore-drilling rig went kablooey in April 2010, killed 11 people, and eventually dumped 210 million g...
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
Tim Burton directed "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children," and while it's a perfect fit for the whimsically macabre filmmaker, he doesn't do much to make it his own. No, the bulk of the story's Halloweenish delights come straight from the Ran...
American Honey
"American Honey" won't make you feel very hopeful about The Kids These Days, but it may fill you with compassion for a generation of unwanted young Americans left to fend for themselves in a cratered economy and a collapsed middle class.
With a pe...
My Blind Brother
As a general rule, we do not make jokes at the expense of the handicapped. The bitterly funny, just-sweet-enough "My Blind Brother" gets away with it because the jokes aren't about his blindness per se, and because the vision-impaired gentleman in qu...
Queen of Katwe
"Queen of Katwe" is a mild Disney film telling the true story of a slum-dwelling Ugandan girl who becomes a chess master (mistress?). Directed by the esteemed Mira Nair, a sensitive chronicler of cultural conflicts ("Monsoon Wedding," "The Namesake")...
The Magnificent Seven
Except for some slightly more graphic violence and language than its forebears used to get away with, the new version of "The Magnificent Seven" is a Western in the old-fashioned style. That's mostly a compliment, though not entirely. With its shooto...
Bridget Jones’s Baby
"Bridget Jones's Baby," in which our favorite diary-keeping singleton has a (spoiler alert) baby, begins with Ms. Jones (Renee Zellweger) alone on her 43rd birthday, listening to "All By Myself." This tells us two things: that the music choices in th...
Snowden
"Snowden," the story of a man blowing the whistle on a secret government surveillance program, seems like a perfect match for Oliver Stone, a paranoid moonbat who loves a good rant. Yet his docudrama about Edward Snowden is restrained, almost dispass...
Blair Witch
Not that "The Blair Witch Project" needed a sequel, but if had to get one, the team of director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett were a good choice. They've made a handful of intense horror features in the last six years, including "You're Next"...
Other People
There's a tendency among first-time filmmakers to assume that being autobiographical makes a movie unique, even when it addresses subjects and situations that have been covered a thousand times before. You can see the logic. Sure, indie films about a...
Sully
Today on "Why Is This a Movie?," we're talking about "Sully," Clint Eastwood's dramatization of the January 2009 incident where Capt. Chesley Sullenberger (not a fake name) landed a plane full of passengers on the Hudson River without anyone being hu...
Morgan
Arrogant scientists create something unnatural and underestimate how powerful it is in ... well, in a lot of movies, now that we think about it. Maybe two-thirds of all science fiction? But "Morgan" is the one we're talking about today, the eager but...
Yoga Hosers
It's bad form to spoil a movie's best joke in a review, but "Yoga Hosers" only has one joke, so we don't have much choice. Here's the joke: Canada, am I right?? From what's left of the mind of Kevin Smith comes this lazy, insular horror-comedy aimed ...
Complete Unknown
"Complete Unknown" begins with fractured clips of the same woman -- or at least the same actress (Rachel Weisz) -- in multiple professions, going by multiple names. Are these fantasies? Past lives? Something else? It's a discombobulated start for wha...
Mechanic: Resurrection
Reader, I'm not going to demean us both by pretending to remember anything about "The Mechanic" (2011) except for the fact that I saw it. (I already looked to see if I wrote a review. I didn't.) It was during that period where every January there was...
Don’t Breathe
"Don't Breathe" is satisfying, meat-and-potatoes horror, the kind that takes a simple premise, adds a couple of flourishes, makes the most of it for 85 minutes, then gets out before it can overstay its welcome. We would all do well to emulate "Don't ...
Southside with You
Whatever you think of Barack Obama as a president, his loving, affectionate relationship with Michelle sets a good example for all married people, and might be the most unassailable aspect of his legacy. So it makes a certain kind of sense that the f...
Hands of Stone
The life of Panamanian boxer Roberto Duran has featured enough drama, setbacks, and victories to make for a terrific movie. Maybe someday someone will make one. In the meantime, here's "Hands of Stone," another well-intentioned but feckless snooze.
...
The Hollars
Stop me if you've heard this one before. "The Hollars" is a Sundance dramedy about a mope who returns from the big city to his hometown to deal with family issues, and finds both the hometown and the family issues unchanged (depressingly so) yet some...
Kubo and the Two Strings
There's something broken in my head that causes me to like and respect Laika's stop-motion animated films without falling in love with them, some emotional circuit that's not being completed. "Coraline" was brilliantly twisted enough for it not to ma...
Ben-Hur (2016)
Here's a fascinating bit of trivia about the 1880 novel "Ben-Hur" that you would never guess from watching Timur Bekmambetov's pedestrian new movie version: it was subtitled "A Tale of the Christ," and it made Judah Ben-Hur's conversion a significant...
War Dogs
In "War Dogs," the title epithet is a derogatory term for dishonest, bottom-feeding greed-monsters who profit from war by selling weapons to the Pentagon. The fact that the bros to whom the term is applied wear it as a badge of honor tells you a lot ...
Morris from America
As you may recall from when it happened to you or from the many movies you've seen on the subject, growing up is hard. That's especially true for kids with single parents, and for minorities, and for kids living in a foreign country. The boy in "Morr...
Pete’s Dragon
Released any time of the year, Disney's in-name-only remake of "Pete's Dragon" would be a delicate and refreshing treat. But it's especially welcome as it comes near the end of a loudly disappointing summer, a soothing balm after so many seething bom...
Sausage Party
The most surprising thing about "Sausage Party" -- a hard-R-rated cartoon conceived as a filthy version of "Toy Story" with food instead of playthings -- is that it's not a one-joke movie. Yes, it has sexual puns about hot dogs (all male) and buns (a...
Florence Foster Jenkins
Florence Foster Jenkins (the person) was a 1940s Manhattan socialite and arts patron whose desire to be a professional singer, shall we say, outpaced her abilities. "Florence Foster Jenkins" (the movie), on the other hand, is quite competent, a cheer...
Hell or High Water
Most Westerns made in the last 50 years, whether set in the past or the present, have been at least partially about how the West has changed from how it was in the Westerns made in the previous 50 years. "Hell or High Water" is no exception. Set in a...
Suicide Squad
"Suicide Squad" is the equivalent of a band releasing a "greatest hits" album that's all new songs and covers, and not very good ones. The same cart-before-the-horse mentality that leads to Part Twos being announced before the Part Ones are finished ...
Nine Lives (2016)
Wow, what a mixup! "Nine Lives" -- a benign, cheap-looking family comedy about a workaholic dad who learns What's Really Important when he becomes trapped in the body of a house cat -- was clearly supposed to be a Disney Channel movie. It carefully a...
Jason Bourne
Maybe too much time has passed since we last saw Jason Bourne, in "The Bourne Ultimatum," in 2007. Maybe his quest for answers went as far as it needed to go and didn't require an extension. Maybe the serviceable "Bourne Legacy," with Jeremy Renner a...
Bad Moms
"Hangover" scribes Jon Lucas and Scott Moore have certainly found their niche. Their debut as writer-directors, "21 & Over," transferred "Hangover"-style debauchery to a college setting, and their latest, "Bad Moms," gives us the Moms Gone Wild v...
Indignation
"Indignation" is the story of a headstrong Jewish atheist from New Jersey who goes to college in Ohio in 1951, feels repressed religiously and romantically, then receives a first-date sexual favor that derails his life. Ah, college! Tawdry though it ...
Nerve
Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, the directing team behind "Catfish," "Paranormal Activity 3" and "4," and the new teen-oriented cyber-thriller "Nerve," know how to affect coolness and currency without seeming to try too hard -- a rarity in Hollywood....
Star Trek Beyond
As attested by the four "Fast and the Furious" movies he made before this, "Star Trek Beyond" director Justin Lin was never a big fan of gravity. Here, at last, he can abuse it with impunity, and some of the most exhilarating moments in this amiable,...
Ice Age: Collision Course
After three harmless, amusing adventures and a fourth movie that I didn't see, the "Ice Age" franchise becomes a burden to society with its fifth entry, "Collision Course," a dismal animated sitcom that exhausts any remaining goodwill toward the seri...
Lights Out
"Lights Out," David F. Sandberg's 81-minute expansion of his 3-minute short, has a fine premise for a 3-minute short. Heck, you could even flesh it out to 10 or 15. This feature-length version, though, has a rushed, half-baked air to it, long enough ...
Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie
Sweetie, darling! That's how you begin any story about "Absolutely Fabulous," the British sitcom best known to Americans through its endless repeats on Comedy Central in the second half of the '90s. I never got into it, but I know how to say "Sweetie...
Free to Run (documentary)
With the sport of running now being enjoyed (if that's the right word) by millions of people worldwide, it's easy to forget that until about 1970, it was rare and bizarre, a pastime for "masochistic weirdos." That's the phrase used by one enthusiast ...
Ghostbusters (2016)
"Ghostbusters," the reboot of an obscure Harold Ramis/Ernie Hudson comedy from the 1980s, is about three scientists and a subway worker who learn that New York City is on the verge of being overrun by mean ghosts and must take action to prevent this....
Cafe Society
For his 45th movie, Woody Allen has once again retreated to the safety of yesteryear, a simpler time when a man could have a girlfriend 20 years his junior without anyone noticing. "Cafe Society," set mostly in Hollywood in the late 1930s, is typical...
The Infiltrator
Bryan Cranston is winning America's hearts and minds one drug at a time -- first as a self-made meth kingpin in "Breaking Bad," now as a U.S. Customs agent going after a Colombian cocaine cartel in "The Infiltrator," a sturdy crime drama based on Rob...
The Secret Life of Pets
It was a clever trick for Universal to call its new animated offering "The Secret Life of Pets," and to market it in a way that suggests it's all about what our pets REALLY do while we're out of the house. That sounds like a fun concept, right? There...
Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates
The premise of "Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates" is that the two rowdy brothers have a history of ruining family gatherings and are begged by their parents to get dates (babysitters, really) for their sister's upcoming nuptials. It's a destination w...
Captain Fantastic
It says something about the charm of "Captain Fantastic" that I was able to enjoy it despite either rolling my eyes or frowning in disapproval at most of the main character's parenting choices. I think he's wrong a lot, but most (not all) of his wron...
Our Little Sister (Japanese)
There's a lot of heartache and yearning under the surface of "Our Little Sister" -- a strange thing to say about a movie so outwardly congenial and nearly conflict-free, but that's the pleasure (maybe) of this understated Japanese family drama from d...
The BFG
"The BFG," based on a Roald Dahl book and directed by Steven Spielberg, has childlike wonderment and whimsy out the wazoo. The title character, a Big Friendly Giant who's made of computers, motion-capture, and Mark Rylance's charming voice, speaks in...
The Purge: Election Year
As you know, the Purge is an annual event during which all crime is legal for 12 hours, enabling people to burn off some steam so they can be law-abiding citizens the other 364.5 days of the year. As of this writing, the Purge is fictional, and the l...
The Legend of Tarzan
"The Legend of Tarzan" begins with the title swinger (played by Alexander Skarsgard) already back in London society after having spent his formative years in the African jungle. He and Jane (Margot Robbie) are married; he's a world-famous celebrity; ...
The Phenom
As "The Phenom" demonstrates, pitching is all about focus. So is filmmaking, for that matter, a fact also demonstrated by this mature, sure-footed drama about a hot young pitcher trying not to crack under the pressure. Writer-director Noah Buschel is...
The Shallows
Any film about a killer shark will inevitably be compared to "Jaws" (usually unfavorably, which is probably why we don't see many of them). But "The Shallows," in which Blake Lively is pestered by a shark near a picturesque Mexican beach, dares to in...
Free State of Jones
Gary Ross, writer-director of such sermonizing entertainments as "Pleasantville" and "Seabiscuit," has returned with another didactic drama, "Free State of Jones," starring an appropriately unhygienic Matthew McConaughey as Newton Knight, a Mississip...
Hunt for the Wilderpeople
Roald Dahl never wrote a chaptered storybook called "Hunt for the Wilderpeople" -- in which a rebellious orphan and a rugged hermit bond while hiding in the bush country to evade child protective services -- but the movie by that title has the dark h...
Swiss Army Man
You may have heard about "Swiss Army Man" as the movie where Paul Dano rides Daniel Radcliffe's fart-propelled corpse around like a jet-ski. What's amazing is that this happens in the first five minutes, yet the movie -- a surreal, philosophical come...
Independence Day: Resurgence
The ads for "Independence Day: Resurgence" say, speaking of the aliens, "We had twenty years to prepare. So did they." But that's not a good thing to remind us of as we watch this dopey, cheesy, SyFy Channel-ish sequel to the 1996 blockbuster. I kept...
The Fundamentals of Caring
The first half of "The Fundamentals of Caring" is a breathlessly witty, almost flawlessly executed comedy starring two very funny men with excellent rapport. If the film had stopped at the 45-minute mark, and if the rest of it had then ceased to exis...
Finding Dory
Like most Pixar movies, "Finding Dory" is a kind-hearted and funny film about psychologically damaged characters seeking happiness in the face of impermanence and death. To fully appreciate it, adults should consider that most of the children in the ...
Central Intelligence
Given their individual popularity and wildly contrasting physical sizes, it was only a matter of time before Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart appeared in a movie together. That movie is "Central Intelligence," a good-natured, low-decibel action comedy f...
Tickled (documentary)
"Tickled" is not a documentary about the strange world of "competitive endurance tickling," whatever that may be. It is, rather, a documentary about one man's efforts to learn about the strange world of competitive endurance tickling, his curiosity (...
The Conjuring 2
"The Conjuring 2," a sequel to the scariest movie of 2013, covers a lot of the same ground -- but it wets a lot of the same pants, too, if you know what I mean. Maybe not as thoroughly, but enough. It takes skill to make something interesting out of ...
Now You See Me 2
Since everything that was wrong with "Now You See Me" is also wrong with its sequel, the blandly titled "Now You See Me 2" (not "Now You Don't"? Not even "Now You See Me, Too"?), I'm just going to repeat what I said then:
When you see a magician d...
Warcraft
Full disclosure: I've never played Warcraft. I was going to read the Wikipedia page so I'd have an idea of the characters and gameplay, but eh, life is short. Everyone knows video games peaked with Frogger anyway.
As a movie, "Warcraft" is an inco...
Genius
The biography from which "Genius" is adapted is called "Max Perkins: Editor of Genius" (by A. Scott Berg), and it's about the literary publisher who worked with such legends as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. How fascinating ...
De Palma (documentary)
Brian De Palma, the eager New Hollywood director who emerged with Spielberg and Scorsese in the 1970s, whose 29 features include "Carrie," "Scarface," and "The Untouchables," is often dismissed as a hack (albeit a talented one) who copies Hitchcock a...
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows
Well, it took 26 years and six attempts, but they finally made a "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" movie that I enjoyed! Which is magnanimous of them, since I wasn't the target audience and never expressed any interest in being part of it. But "Out of t...
Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping
After several years of viral success making some of SNL's most popular "digital shorts," The Lonely Island -- aka Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone -- have now expanded their musical parody ambitions to fill a feature film, the Justin B...
Me Before You
When it comes to romance movies, the only thing better than a happy ending is an ending where one of the beautiful young lovers dies (but not of something gross). Knowing this, "Me Before You" dangles both possible outcomes in front of us, turning th...
X-Men: Apocalypse
After the first trilogy of X-Men movies (and that standalone Wolverine movie that nobody liked), they launched a new series that went back in time to show the X-Men as children. Now we arrive at "X-Men: Apocalypse," the third film in the second trilo...
Alice Through the Looking Glass
"Alice Through the Looking Glass" is the stagnant, mirthless sequel to "Alice in Wonderland," the garish live-action Disney film that was itself a sequel to, um, "Alice in Wonderland." (It's been six years and I'm still annoyed by that.) Obviously, t...
The Ones Below
For all its miraculous beauty, there is also something eerie and alien about pregnancy, even when you know how the baby got there and how it's going to get out. Films have exploited the fears of expectant parents for as long as movies have been allow...
The Nice Guys
First of all, if you haven't seen "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," Shane Black's giddy deconstruction of action movies and detective fiction starring Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer, stop what you're doing immediately and watch it. Not only is it a pithy deli...
The Angry Birds Movie
Think about what an awful assignment it would be to write a screenplay based on a video game -- and not one of the complex games full of characters and stories, either, but a smartphone game like Angry Birds, where you just have to knock stuff over. ...
Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising
It's been two years since we were delightfully surprised by "Neighbors," a raunchy comedy about new parents vs. the fraternity next door that was lean, well-written, and funny, not loose and sloppy like raunchy comedies often are. The sequel, "Neighb...
The Darkness
It must be 30 years now since those aliens delivered the PG-13 Horror Movie Template to the Hollywood studios, and here they are, still getting regular use out of it. Say what you will about liberal, godless Hollywood, at least they're into recycling...
Money Monster
In "Money Monster," a mildly ridiculous thriller with a bafflingly impressive pedigree, a brash financial guru's live TV show is interrupted by a desperate gun- and bomb-wielding man who followed his stock advice and lost everything. He doesn't want ...
A Bigger Splash
Once you get past the initial disappointment of "A Bigger Splash" not being the long-awaited sequel to "Splash," it's a well-crafted piece of understated adult drama. Directed by Luca Guadagnino ("I Am Love") as a loose remake of the 1969 French film...
Pelé
Warm up your cringe muscles, everyone. Brazilian soccer legend Pelé is at last the subject of a biographical sports drama, called "Pelé: Birth of a Legend" on the poster but just "Pelé" in the movie itself. No one would argue against Pelé's worthines...
Captain America: Civil War
Episode 13 of the very popular show "Marvel Cinematic Universe" is titled "Captain America: Civil War," but it's really more of an Avengers episode than a Cap episode, except that Thor and Hulk aren't around. The rest of your favorites are here, thou...
Dark Horse (documentary)
If you wanted to engineer a documentary for maximum appeal to the widest possible audience, you could hardly do better than "Dark Horse." It's a sports movie (insofar as horse-racing is a sport), but it hits most of the sweet spots for people who don...
Keanu
Fans of Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele's eponymous sketch show will not be surprised to learn that their movie, "Keanu," feels like a sketch -- a funny one, sure, but less and less so the longer it goes on.
The basic comedic premise is solid...
Mother’s Day
The Internet doesn't have enough space for me to describe all the ways that "Mother's Day" is bad, so I will have to be selective about what I include. Note that this already makes me better than the movie, which included everything.
It's directed...
The Man Who Knew Infinity
Biopics in general have fallen into a rut of rote storytelling and a textbook-like recitation of facts, but the direst subsection has got to be biopics about scientists and mathematicians. Movies about athletes, actors, musicians, and statesmen at le...
The Wait (Italian/French)
True to its title, "The Wait" ("L'attesa") is about people waiting for others to arrive or return, and it begins with an image of one of history's most eagerly anticipated figures: Jesus Christ, in the form of a large crucifix displayed in a Sicilian...
The Huntsman: Winter’s War
"The Huntsman: Winter's War" is one of THOSE movies, the kind that are very trendy right now, where we start with a narrator saying, "You think you know this story, BUT YOU DON'T! There is a whole different story that you've never seen, because we ju...
Elvis & Nixon
No doubt you've seen the famous 1970 photo of President Richard M. Nixon and Elvis Presley shaking hands in the Oval Office, which was just about as incongruous a coupling of rock 'n' roll and the Establishment as anyone could have imagined at the ti...
The Meddler
The first line of dialogue in "The Meddler" is "Anyway." It's the title character speaking, Marnie (Susan Sarandon), a recently widowed Mom from New Jersey with nothing to do with her time now but leave long, discursive voice mails for her daughter, ...
Sing Street
Boy meets girl; boy likes girl; boy starts band to impress girl. It's a story as old as time, and "Sing Street" -- an exuberant musical from "Once" writer-director John Carney -- tells it gracefully, with warm humor and a touch of bittersweet nostalg...
The Jungle Book
Disney's new live-action version of "The Jungle Book" has the same basic plot and many of the same details as the 1967 animated one, so let's not kid ourselves about why it exists. It's not because the Disney braintrust wanted to improve upon their p...
Barbershop: The Next Cut
Spike Lee's most recent movie, "Chi-Raq," was a satirical comedy about efforts to curb gang violence in Chicago's black neighborhoods. Not many people saw it (though it's great -- it made my top 10 list last year); like a lot of Spike Lee films, its ...
Criminal (2016)
There's no shortage of ludicrous action movies for teenagers, but let us sing the praises, however mildly and briefly, of far-fetched thrillers meant for adults -- like "Criminal," a sober-minded (but nonsensical) piece of espionage fluff from the wr...
Green Room
One of the occupational hazards of being a young, struggling punk band is that sometimes the roadhouse where you've booked a gig turns out to be a den of Nazi skinheads. "Green Room" starts with that uncomfortable arrangement ("Don't talk politics," ...
The Boss
Let us stipulate that Melissa McCarthy is funny. She just is. She has brilliant instincts, she can play sweet just as convincingly as vulgar, and her character work is always fully committed and fundamentally amusing, even in material that isn't very...
Hardcore Henry
"Hardcore Henry" is a "first-person movie," as in, "Let me be the first person to tell you how bad this movie is." Written and directed by Ilya Naishuller (a protege of Russian genre-man Timur Bekmambetov), this barely coherent fantasy shoot-em-up is...
Hush
"Hush" is a tense, breathless horror film full of things we've seen before but can never get enough of when they're done well, including a kickass heroine, an inherently frightening premise, and a creepy stalker in a white mask. It also has a few ter...
The Invitation
"The Invitation" begins with a mopey sad-sack named Will (Logan Marshall-Green) and his sympathetic girlfriend, Kira (Emayatzy Corinealdi), hitting an animal that darts in front of their car. Their mood was already sober: they're going to Will's ex-w...
Standing Tall (French)
"Standing Tall" ("La Tete Haute") begins in the office of a French family court judge, where a frazzled, uneducated young mother struggles to explain over the wails of her baby son why her other son, 6-year-old Malony, is such a miscreant at school t...
