Celebrity Life

Friends of Ours review Getting through the pandemic in 2021 was getting easier, but the hospitality scene still had trouble reopening with the new Delta variants. During the lockdown, I’ve…

The divide between people who claim to love New Year’s Eve and those who loathe it is perhaps not as wide as you’d think. Even if you strive to view the midnight countdown as a time of fresh beginnings, it’s human to be at least slightly haunted by the specter of everything you failed to…

The decision to open The Tragedy of Macbeth in theaters on Christmas Day—like releasing a murder of anxious, captive crows into the sky—has to be one of the most perverse marketing strategies of recent years. It’s also brilliant and perfect, if not from a moneymaking perspective, then definitely from an artistic one. Audiences will be…

Warning: Spoilers ahead for the Amazon Prime Video series, The Wheel of Time As this mostly crappy year comes to an increasingly crappy close, one of the rare high points in these Omicron times was getting to watch the finale to the first season of The Wheel of Time. As a longtime fan of the…

Growing up is never easy to do, but it often makes for rich, expressive filmmaking. The Hand of God is Paolo Sorrentino’s memoir about his teenage years in Naples in the 1980s, about the enveloping embrace of family love, the numbing sharpness of grief, and the way pain is sometimes the thing that kickstarts ambition.…

Some people love a nice, cheerful movie at holiday time. For everyone else, there’s Nightmare Alley, Guillermo del Toro’s thoughtful and darkly glamourous reimagining of both William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel and the 1947 film noir that sprang from its dark seed, starring Tyrone Power and Joan Blondell. Del Toro’s Nightmare Alley, set in the…

Middle-aged Ben Affleck is the best Ben Affleck. Affleck has written films, written and directed films and played Batman. He’s been up, he’s been down. He’s been trim and he’s been paunchy. He’s been around seemingly forever, or at least a quarter-century: His role as high-school bully O’Bannion in Richard Linklater’s 1993 Dazed and Confused…

If Being the Ricardos were just a movie about the insidious evil of the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Hollywood blacklist, it would be a bit of a yawn. But as the story of a marriage between two brilliant professionals, one of whom—the man, incidentally—often took a backseat to his more dazzling partner, it…

Sean Baker's latest isn't his warmest film, but with Rex's charismatic hustler, it gives us an extraordinary new movie character

Being clonked with a meteor would be more subtle than this cautionary tale about the Earth's fragility

If 2020 was a long, dark winter for movie lovers—a season of some terrific pictures, sure, but also a long slog of having no choice but to stream everything at home—2021 has been the exuberant, celebratory spring. Not even just your regular, garden-variety spring, but a full-on Stravinsky-style spring, with crocuses bursting from the earth…

When the weather outside is frightful, sometimes the only solution is to make the mood scarier with a spooky movie. Christmas rom-coms and holiday classics are always delightful, of course, but occasionally you want something with a little more kick. This is where the Christmas horror movie comes in. While it may seem counterintuitive to…