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3/4
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RENAISSANCE: A FILM BY BEYONCÉ
(2023)
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Michael Phillips
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Beyoncé's outrageously lavish five-month 2023 concert tour’s mixture of spectacle, spangle, video immersion and dance party has been captured, deliriously, for fans who caught the show live and those who didn’t.
Posted Dec 01, 2023
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2/4
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Candy Cane Lane
(2023)
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Michael Phillips
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[It] isn’t a chore or a travesty or anything. But certainly, it’s less than Murphy deserves.
Posted Nov 30, 2023
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3/4
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Maestro
(2023)
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Michael Phillips
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Maestro darts and hops around, bracingly; it’s a little like flipping through a big, stylish scrapbook, more or less but not strictly in chronological order.
Posted Nov 30, 2023
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3.5/4
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Smooth Talk
(1985)
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Gene Siskel
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The strained mother-daughter relationship in ''Smooth Talk'' is one of the film's highlights, suggesting that envy often translates into hostility.
Posted Nov 26, 2023
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3/4
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Rustin
(2023)
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Michael Phillips
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As written, “Rustin” does a pretty good job of making the (re-)introductions. As acted, the movie transcends pretty-good.
Posted Nov 22, 2023
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2/4
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Napoleon
(2023)
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Michael Phillips
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While Napoleon isn’t a spoof or a comic dismantling of a legend, its sense of humor is an uncertain thing indeed, matched by Scott’s frustrating uncertainty in crucial visual decisions.
Posted Nov 21, 2023
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2.5/4
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The Duellists
(1977)
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Gene Siskel
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The story might have worked if there was an undercurrent of attractiveness to Keitel's loutish character. But he is an unwavering boor from start to finish, and his prowess with weapons is in no way redeeming.
Posted Nov 21, 2023
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3.5/4
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May December
(2023)
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Michael Phillips
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May December exists in an uncomfortable realm. Haynes isn’t afraid of that, and American movies are better for it.
Posted Nov 17, 2023
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2/4
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The Legend of Billie Jean
(1985)
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Sid Smith
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Teenagers, who may not have seen this picture's many hero/outlaw predecessors, might like its the pop soundtrack, better-than-average acting and modest punk attire. Everyone else is likely to find Billie Jean the very thing that becomes a legend least.
Posted Nov 17, 2023
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3/4
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Alien
(1979)
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Gene Siskel
|
Alien is mostly in the business of thrills, and on that score it did provide more than a few... Even more enjoyable, though, was watching the film debut of an actress who should become a major star, Sigourney Weaver.
Posted Nov 16, 2023
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2.5/4
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Thanksgiving
(2023)
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Michael Phillips
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Thanksgiving works. It’s predictably gory but, at its best, unpredictably nimble. In a career pockmarked by lows, Roth’s latest stands out as a zesty example of holiday stress in extremis.
Posted Nov 15, 2023
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2/4
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The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes
(2023)
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Michael Phillips
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Songbirds and Snakes takes its job Super-seriously, with more solemnity than imaginative excitement.
Posted Nov 15, 2023
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3/4
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Cocoon
(1985)
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Gene Siskel
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Listening to Jessica Tandy, Hume Cronyn and Wilford Brimley talk about anything except most of today's movie scripts is an automatic pleasure.
Posted Nov 12, 2023
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State Fair
(1933)
|
Mae Tinee
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State fair, adapted from the popular novel by Phil Stong, is wholesome, homely, astute comedy drama. It abounds in clean humor, bunkless performance and interesting incident.
Posted Nov 10, 2023
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3.5/4
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All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
(2023)
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Michael Phillips
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Without the central relationship between the adult sisters as a compass I don’t know if Jackson’s approach would work at all. But McClure and Ingram are first-rate, as vivid in their unspoken understanding as they are in their easygoing banter.
Posted Nov 10, 2023
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4/4
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Little Big Man
(1970)
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Gene Siskel
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Little Big Man, a movie created on a broad scale, is an example of what an epic film should be. Mixing morals and sight gags, history and fiction, humanism and genocide, and it requires of an audience that it be appreciated as a sprawling yarn.
Posted Nov 10, 2023
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2.5/4
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The Marvels
(2023)
|
Michael Phillips
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Director and co-writer Nia DaCosta’s agreeable weirdo of a movie has a few things going for it. It’s genuinely peculiar, its nervous energy keeping things reasonably diverting. Also there’s an extended scene of Flerken.
Posted Nov 08, 2023
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3/4
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Smoke Signals
(1998)
|
Mark Caro
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Beach portrays Victor as a likable, charismatic brooder, and Adams, with his off-kilter rhythms and soft features, makes a distinctive impression as Thomas.
Posted Nov 08, 2023
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2/4
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Sly
(2023)
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Nina Metz
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Stallone is unquestionably a magnetic screen presence. If only the film were able to capture who he is beyond that.
Posted Nov 07, 2023
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1.5/4
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The Killer
(2023)
|
Michael Phillips
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At heart, an elevator pitch for a two-hour pilot for a slick, junky Netflix series about a globe-trotting assassin.
Posted Nov 02, 2023
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2/4
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Nyad
(2023)
|
Nina Metz
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Directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin are primarily documentary filmmakers... But they struggle to adapt some of those skills to a scripted format, relying too heavily on archival footage, which gums up the film rather than deepens it.
Posted Nov 01, 2023
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3.5/4
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Priscilla
(2023)
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Michael Phillips
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Coppola’s perspective, and Priscilla Presley’s, is a small, sure film about the largest of royal showbiz lives led in the brightest, harshest of spotlights, or in the unsettling quiet of a room, where someone has just left it with a little less oxygen.
Posted Nov 01, 2023
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3.5/4
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The Holdovers
(2023)
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Michael Phillips
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This movie’s religion, if it has one, is the Church of Performance, and Giamatti, Sessa, Randolph and company make it worth attending.
Posted Nov 01, 2023
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2/4
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Five Nights at Freddy's
(2023)
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Michael Phillips
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The premise, meantime, of “Five Nights at Freddy’s” is entirely about the cruelty, and very likely would’ve made more sense as a straight-up R-rated splatterfest.
Posted Oct 27, 2023
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4/4
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The Last Picture Show
(1971)
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Gene Siskel
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Like few films in recent years, Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show ends with us wanting to see more of the people who occupy the small town world that is Anarene, Tex., in 1951. This emotion is not easily achieved.
Posted Oct 25, 2023
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3.5/4
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The Royal Hotel
(2023)
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Michael Phillips
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Garner and Henwick are doing the kind of acting that looks easy but isn’t. It’s a film of flickering doubts and accumulating, justifiable paranoia.
Posted Oct 23, 2023
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3.5/4
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The Pigeon Tunnel
(2023)
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Nina Metz
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Maybe the best reason to watch “The Pigeon Tunnel,” though, is that it is a reminder of what documentaries can be when they’re made by a real filmmaker with sophisticated and cinematic ambitions.
Posted Oct 20, 2023
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3.5/4
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Killers of the Flower Moon
(2023)
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Michael Phillips
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A lavish, big-budget period picture, old-school in its set-building and packed, teeming frames of extras in period-perfect clothes.
Posted Oct 19, 2023
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2.5/4
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TAYLOR SWIFT | THE ERAS TOUR
(2023)
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Michael Phillips
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As fan service, and as a bypass of the conventional Hollywood movie distribution model, “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” has done the job.
Posted Oct 16, 2023
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2/4
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Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
(1974)
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Gene Siskel
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The characters aren't real, the situations in which they are placed aren't real, and, as a result, one cares little how the alleged relationships develop.
Posted Oct 12, 2023
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2/4
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The Burial
(2023)
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Nina Metz
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I love a good paperwork movie. “The Burial” is not that. Nor are the legal maneuverings treated with patience and care, even as the whole thing devolves into something of a circus.
Posted Oct 11, 2023
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4/4
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Raging Bull
(1980)
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Gene Siskel
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If you like a movie down-and-dirty, Raging Bull is it. Filmed in black-and-white, and shockingly well acted by De Niro, Raging Bull suggests that if you are looking for the source of evil in the world, you don't have to look any further than yourself.
Posted Oct 10, 2023
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3/4
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Taxi Driver
(1976)
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Gene Siskel
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Remove the cataclysmic ending from Taxi Driver and it would be one smashingly good motion picture. As it stands, the film is beautiful to look at, exciting to listen to, but much too much to stomach.
Posted Oct 06, 2023
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4/4
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Taxi Driver
(1976)
|
Michael Wilmington
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Made with feverish intensity by its white-hot, mostly young cast and crew, this is a film that can ravish, amuse and terrify you by turns.
Posted Oct 05, 2023
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2/4
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The Exorcist: Believer
(2023)
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Michael Phillips
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The Exorcist: Believer has its moments, but we’ve had a half-century of this stuff.
Posted Oct 05, 2023
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3.5/4
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Fair Play
(2023)
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Michael Phillips
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Fair Play really does manage to play fair in terms of balancing our antipathy with our voyeuristic interest in what’s happening.
Posted Sep 29, 2023
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2/4
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Reptile
(2023)
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Nina Metz
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Del Toro and Silverstone make a meal out of what tends to be a pro forma side to these kinds of thrillers
Posted Sep 29, 2023
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2.5/4
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The Creator
(2023)
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Michael Phillips
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Edwards’ movie has a human pulse and a visual landscape worth exploring. Tangled plot threads and all.
Posted Sep 29, 2023
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4/4
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Stop Making Sense
(1984)
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Michael Phillips
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The movie is the finest imaginable version of the Talking Heads’ Speaking in Tongues tour. The concert’s physical staging elements, introduced in pieces and segments, with elegant and wryly suggestive words, create an aura of pristine unease.
Posted Sep 22, 2023
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2.5/4
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A Haunting in Venice
(2023)
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Michael Phillips
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Branagh’s portrayal of a somewhat older and wearier Poirot, muted but carefully calibrated, remains two steps ahead of Branagh’s direction.
Posted Sep 14, 2023
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2/4
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My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3
(2023)
|
Michael Phillips
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Director Vardalos, the keeper of her half-billion-dollar franchise, mistakes antsiness for energy, cutting constantly, messing up the rhythms.
Posted Sep 07, 2023
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3/4
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Sitting in Bars with Cake
(2023)
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Michael Phillips
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Sitting in Bars with Cake creates a story, from ingredients that won’t strike anyone as radically fresh, transcending formula and focused, smartly, on a moving story of a friendship, brought to life by Yara Shahidi and Odessa A’zion.
Posted Sep 07, 2023
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4/4
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Lone Star
(1996)
|
Gene Siskel
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I can't stress enough the excellence of Sayles' script... He packs an incredible number of supporting characters and telling vignettes into a story that contains real tension, genuine romance and stunning surprises.
Posted Sep 06, 2023
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2/4
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Selena
(1997)
|
John Petrakis
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The result feels like a work produced for the Family Channel, to be followed by a panel discussion about family values and a sales pitch for the new Selena doll.
Posted Sep 06, 2023
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3/4
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When a Man Loves a Woman
(1994)
|
Michael Wilmington
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Andy Garcia conveys an almost glacial calm and fortitude beneath which a reservoir of boiling rage consistently seems to simmer.
Posted Sep 01, 2023
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3/4
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When a Man Loves a Woman
(1994)
|
Gene Siskel
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[The film wraps] up the subject with a comball happy ending. At the same time, the story Is very smart, well-acted and hard-edged about the way children can be tragically caught up a parent's addiction.
Posted Sep 01, 2023
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2/4
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The Good Mother
(2023)
|
Michael Phillips
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The script, cowritten by Madison Harrison, is a strange, tentative beast: It overpacks in the early going, and then dog-paddles around, pausing for nonverbal character business.
Posted Aug 31, 2023
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3/4
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Reinventing Elvis: The '68 Comeback
(2023)
|
Nina Metz
|
By focusing on just a few months in Presley’s career, he [Scheinfeld] has created a rich portrait of not only the singer but the era itself.
Posted Aug 24, 2023
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3/4
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Perpetrator
(2023)
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Michael Phillips
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This is a sly, poetically gory vision of predation, female rage, female survival and every kind of shape-shifting women learn, out of necessity, when they’re young.
Posted Aug 24, 2023
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3/4
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Bottoms
(2023)
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Michael Phillips
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In the end, all these young women want is a foothold on life, a little less humiliation and some physical intimacy. If that makes Bottoms snarky on the outside but conventionally heartfelt on the inside, well, that’s fine, actually.
Posted Aug 24, 2023
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