Criticisms aside, Olivia Colman’s performance is the tide that lifts all ships.

  A morbidly obese man racked with self-loathing makes a desperate eleventh-hour attempt to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter in the overstuffed but worthwhile drama, The Whale. Brendan Fraser, reshaped by three hundred pounds of prosthetics, stars as Charlie. Charlie’s horrific physical condition isn’t the only thing that makes the titular metaphor so apropos; […]

Not unlike its two central characters, A Love Song speaks softly and honestly and without hyperbolic drama, making this little slice of senior romance a thought-provoking delight.

  An omnipotent being is threatening the multiverse. Who ya gonna call? Spiderman? Dr. Strange? How about a middle-aged Asian-American woman failing as a wife and mother? Her name is Evelyn, and she’s the unlikely hero of Everything Everywhere All at Once, the mind-bending action-comedy written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinerts, collectively […]

To Leslie is the type of film adults would flock to before Disney and superheroes saturated the market. Here’s hoping Andrea Riseborough’s controversial but well deserved Oscar nod inspires lovers of mature cinema to seek it out.

  The final chapter of a British gentleman’s life, numbed by decades of routine drudgery, blossoms with newfound purpose in the Oscar-nominated film, Living. Bill Nighy delivers a towering portrayal of understated pathos as Mr. Williams, the top bureaucrat at a public works office in 1953’s downtown London. As a widower, Mr. Williams lives with […]

Can the world find a solution before the cosmos delivers an Etch-A-Sketch erasure of all life on earth?

Apollo 10 ½ was one of the most critically acclaimed films of 2022.

  A group of self-indulgent one-percenters gets their comeuppance in Triangle of Sadness, the schadenfreude comedy written and directed by Swedish filmmaker Ruben Östlund. Ever since his 2014 international breakout film, Force Majeure, Östlund has been operating at peak artistic powers. With Triangle of Sadness, he earned his second Palme d’Or at the prestigious Cannes […]

  Look within the margins of a Steven Spielberg movie and every so often you’ll see him grappling with the aftereffects of his parent’s failed marriage. It might be Richard Dreyfus as the father who deserts his family in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or Tom Cruise playing a man estranged from his children […]