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Ireally wanted to hate Pope Francis: A Man of His Word' but couldn't bring myself to do it. In fact, I ended up kind of...uh...loving it. What's worse, by the [...]

In the world of moviemaking, where genre entertainments can rake in big profits but also grind a filmmaker's artistic idiosyncrasies into pop mush, we may well wonder what happens to [...]

'I don't think I can be labeled a Catholic artist,' the director Alfred Hitchcock told Francois Truffaut, 'but it may be that one's early upbringing influences a man's life and [...]

Power is certainly seductive, but the seduction is not always sexual. Not just trophy wives and mistresses but also hangers-on, go-betweens, bagmen, publicists, even chauffeurs and physical trainers--all those behind [...]

Recently I wrote of Manchester by the Sea that one 'rarely comes across a film that captures the drift and flow of daily life and conveys its pungent poetry.' Yet, [...]

All salesmen get in your face sooner or later, and Michael Keaton as Ray Kroc gets in yours right in the very first shot of The Founder, the propulsively entertaining [...]

Even a frequent moviegoer rarely comes across a film that captures the drift and flow of daily life and conveys its pungent poetry. But Kenneth Lonergan's Manchester by the Sea [...]

Aman is sleeping beside his wife late at night in their bedroom. Suddenly the door crashes open and an intruder flashes a light in their eyes, tells them their marriage [...]

Moonlight is a blazing iceberg of a movie. Blazing because of the passion that informs every shot, an iceberg because so much of its meaning resides beneath the surface events [...]

There is no way to turn the story of Nat Turner into an entertainment that is morally neat and emotionally digestible. The worst thing about The Birth of a Nation, [...]

In an interview he gave a few years ago, Morgan Freeman suggested that Clint Eastwood might be the very best of current American film directors for sheer storytelling skill. Since [...]

In the very first minute of Anne Fontaine's The Innocents, serenity fills the screen... and is quickly shattered. We're in a convent chapel in late-1945 Poland. Bathed in a light [...]

Can a movie be too entertaining? More specifically, can a film that's trying to convey a social critique be so much fun to watch that it fails to sting? Jodie [...]

Miles Davis and Chet Baker: two trumpet-playing international stars of jazz (though Davis bridled at the word and preferred 'social music'); both coming into prominence in the late 1940s bebop [...]

Laden with awards (the Oscar for best foreign-language film, a Golden Globe, the Grand Prix at Cannes), the Hungarian movie Son of Saul proves to be a stark viewing experience [...]

Just in time to relieve the post-Oscar doldrums comes the reappearance of Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight, the 1966 adaptation of Shakespeare's two Henry IV plays. It is a work [...]

One of the first shots The Revenant presents us with is a wide view of a wintry landscape somewhere in the Louisiana Purchase territory in 1827. A group of trappers [...]

Paolo Sorrentino chose a deceptive title for his latest film, Youth. Here the word doesn't refer to a fixed stage in life but to the mysterious inner spark--as much spiritual [...]

To hell with postmodern irony. Here are two unabashedly earnest movies with straight-arrow heroes: The Martian gives us an astronaut who survives all alone on Mars after being left for [...]

Any moviegoer hearing of a new gangster movie has a right to ask, 'Why another?' The genre's tropes--the protagonist's rise to the top over the bodies of senior mobsters, his [...]

You will never see a movie better designed or more carefully premeditated than Woody Allen's Irrational Man. Notwithstanding the film's title, not a scintilla of irrationality finds its way into [...]

'AMY' Right after I saw Asif Kapadia's riveting documentary Amy, about the brilliantly talented and pathetically vulnerable pop singer Amy Winehouse, some observations about Dylan Thomas by the novelist-critic Elizabeth [...]

Ex Machina is a deceptive movie about deceptions: the deception of attractive surfaces, the deception at the heart of a scientific experiment, the deception employed by an immured android that [...]

This has been a dreadful year at the movies for the great Victorian art critic John Ruskin. The otherwise superb biopic Mr. Turner portrays the man as an effeminate popinjay [...]

Feeling emotionally robust, moviegoer? You'd better be if you intend to see Leviathan, the acclaimed Golden Globe winner and Oscar nominee for best foreign film, written and directed by Andrey [...]

Mr. Turner is a movie about a walking oxymoron: a mantroll who plods through the streets as if he were carrying ten-pound hods on each shoulder; who emits piggish snorts [...]