There is a lot of love in “Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood,” and quite a bit to enjoy. The screen is crowded with signs of Quentin Tarantino’s well-established ardor — for the movies and television shows of the decades after World War II; for the vernacular architecture, commercial signage and famous restaurants of Los Angeles; for the female foot and the male jawline; for vintage clothes and cars and cigarettes. But the mood in this, his ninth feature, is for the most part affectionate rat...
Watching the newest version of “The Lion King” — a big-screen celebrity-voiced musical trying its best to look like a television nature documentary — I recalled a line from John Gregory Dunne’s 1969 book “The Studio” that may be my all-time favorite sentence in the annals of movie writing. “Six months were devoted to teaching Chee Chee the Chimpanzee how to cook bacon and eggs,” Dunne wrote, referring to a character in “Doctor Dolittle,” one of many real animals cast in that big-budget, famil...
One of the most interesting documentaries of 2018 was Robert Greene’s “Bisbee 17,” about a historical re-enactment in an Arizona town that exposed how past conflicts continue to fester. “I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians,” the latest feature from Romanian director Radu Jude (“Scarred Hearts,” “Aferim!”), takes up a similar theme, showing that history is never neutral and that present-day culture wars often carry out the violence of the past by other means.
Sam is 33 years old, unemployed and counting down the days to eviction from his apartment near the Los Angeles reservoir that gives “Under the Silver Lake” its name. He doesn’t seem too upset about his situation, though he is kind of a mopey guy. His malaise looks like more of a temperamental or existential condition than the response to a crisis. And he doesn’t have it all that bad.
At the beginning of “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote,” text on-screen proclaims that what we are about to see has been “25 years in the making.” It might be even longer than that. Terry Gilliam has been tilting at this particular windmill since its eventual star, Adam Driver, was in elementary school. (It’s not Driver who plays the Knight of Doleful Countenance, by the way, but Gilliam stalwart Jonathan Pryce.) The legends surrounding the project have made “Quixote” one of the great films maud...
“Little” is about what happens when an adult woman (Regina Hall) is punished for her bullying, vainglorious ways by turning into her 13-year-old self (Marsai Martin). As the premise for a comedy, this kind of body switch is just about foolproof. “Big,” “13 Going on 30,” the several variations on the “Freaky Friday” theme — it’s almost always fun to watch grown-up souls inhabiting immature physiques, and vice versa. And so it is here, even if this go-round leaves a lot of potential hilarity on...
In 1971, C.P. Ellis was the Exalted Cyclops of the Durham, North Carolina, klavern of the United Klans of America. Ann Atwater was a fair-housing activist, advocating for better treatment for the city’s African-American residents. The beginning of their unlikely real-life friendship is the subject of “The Best of Enemies,” the latest muddled and well-meaning big-screen attempt to find solace in the history of American racism.
“That’s great poetry,” Moondog says near the end of “The Beach Bum,” delivering a verdict on his own work. A bit later, after a literally explosive bacchanal during which bales of cash and a sailboat are set alight, he declares the evening “a blast,” inserting an expletive for emphasis.
To call “The Highwaymen” revisionist — or even reactionary — would be an understatement. This retelling of the Bonnie and Clyde story is not content to posit that those two Depression-era outlaws got what they deserved when they died in a hail of bullets on a Louisiana back road. It has a sackful of bones to pick with the modern world as a whole. Violent criminals are a problem, yes, but so are movies, airplanes, car radios, women in politics, newspapers — you name it. If Grandpa Simpson coul...
One thing we learn in “Captain Marvel” is that it’s pronounced MarVELL, like the English poet — or at least it used to be, on distant planets and right here on Earth, a windy rock also known as C-53. That was back in 1995, when most of this movie takes place and when the world as we know it had not yet been colonized by the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Yes, of course, Marvel Comics had been around for decades, but when the heroine crashes through the roof of the Blockbuster Video store, landing...
