The nobly-named Ansel Elgort and Oakes Fegley play the same guy in The Goldfinch: Theo Decker, who loses his mom in a bombing at the Met and then goes on to (semi-spoiler alert) sort of lose it. Given that the new movie is based on a rather famous book—Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch—we thought it would be appropriate…

When we go to space, how much of our baggage will we bring with us? The question hangs over James Gray’s Ad Astra, a mesmerizing sci-fi drama that takes us to a future where humanity has started to colonize the solar system and the stars have begun to lose some of their luster. There are Applebee’s and souvenir stands…

The problem with so many movies that try to portray the drudgery and frustrations of office life is the pervasive feeling (however inaccurate it may be) that the filmmakers may not have ever experienced that drudgery firsthand. This can be true even of filmmakers who have ears and eyes for the mundane. Sam Bain,…

Robbie Hart (Adam Sandler) and Julia Sullivan (Drew Barrymore) make each other laugh. That’s a surprisingly rare occurrence in romantic comedies, where the jokes are usually reserved for the audience’s benefit. And it’s not just Barrymore’s guileless cater waiter laughing at the madcap antics of Sandler’s charming…

Go easy on Larry Fessenden: He’s been re-imagining Frankenstein since well before the recent wave of variations on Mary Shelley’s classic sci-fi/horror tale. Fessenden’s films as a director often revolve around contemporary retellings of classic monsters, from 1991’s No Telling—itself an interpretation of the…

The Goldfinch is a very pretty movie. That’s no shock, given the directing and cinematography team of John Crowley (Brooklyn) and Roger Deakins (a not-inconsiderable portion of the best-looking American films of the past 20 years). Aesthetics add new value to a narrative that loses its original medium—namely, all…

There’s a reason that TIFF is often regarded as the unofficial start to awards season. Some of the other fests in its calendar vicinity, like Telluride and Venice, have a better track record for premiering movies that will become major awards contenders. (The programmers here don’t seem too hung up on being the…

“I feel like I’m in a dream,” Charlie (Adam Driver) tells Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) the moment after she serves him divorce papers. The papers aren’t a surprise—he knew this day was coming, and there’s little indication that he believes that their differences are, as they say, reconcilable. For both parties, it’s…

One of the fall’s most anticipated films, Hustlers is the kind of flashy, based-on-a-true-story drama that should pique the interest of moviegoers exasperated with franchise fare. Adapted from “The Hustlers At Scores,” a New York Magazine piece written by journalist Jessica Pressler, writer-director Lorene Scafaria…

A good redemption story needs a badly behaved protagonist—a “proper cunt” in the very British parlance of the Gallagher brothers—and Liam Gallagher certainly fit that bill back in the ’90s. As the singer (but, notably, not the songwriter) for Oasis, he went from a hardscrabble working-class existence to the top of the…

Joker (Grade: B-), an operatic and fashionably nihilistic smear of comic-book mythmaking that already feels like a phenomenon a whole month before it’s even scheduled to open, is a movie that could only exist right now, at this exact moment in pop culture history. There is, for one, a certain exploitative topicality…

Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932), a nightmarish pre-Code horror film populated by actual carnival sideshow performers, is the rare masterpiece that not only couldn’t, but probably shouldn’t, be remade. Thankfully, the only thing that first-time filmmakers Adam Stein and Zach Lipovsky have borrowed for their own Freaks is…

In retrospect, it’s clear that writer-creator Julian Fellowes already had his sights set on a reunion when he capped off the phenomenally popular six-season run of his ITV/PBS period drama, Downton Abbey. (The actors have even said as much.) While the series finale offered a sense of finality for the aristocratic…

Judy Garland reinvented herself dozens of times in her 47 years of life. The child vaudevillian. The teenage girl next door. The MGM musical star. The brassy concert performer. The Oscar contender. The boozy TV host. The troubled Hollywood cautionary tale. In a 1968 interview on The Dick Cavett Show, Garland joked,…

Like the Mayan teenagers whose quiet lives are upended by forces beyond their control at the beginning of Gregory Nava’s 1984 debut, El Norte is an unassuming film of unexpected depth. On its surface, it’s a straightforward realist drama about Rosa (Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez) and Enrique (David Villalpando), siblings…

Anyone who grew up on the gentle affirmations and plainly presented life lessons of Fred Rogers may feel a strange flush of cognitive dissonance during the first scene of A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood (Grade: B-). The film begins with a mostly spot-on re-creation of the opening sequence of the beloved…

Dorothy (Constance Wu) makes her living as an exotic dancer, climbing into the laps of Wall Street types and seducing them into buying plenty of drinks—and leaving plenty of tips—under her alias of Destiny. But Hustlers writer-director Lorene Scafaria is interested in a different sort of intimacy: Her camera seems to…

Just about anyone who’s lived in New York City knows that peace and quiet is a rare, precious commodity. The Sound Of Silence, however, takes place in a fantasy Gotham where so little din prevails that numerous residents hire a “house tuner”: someone who claims to identify and remove maddening, barely audible…

Every once in a while, a movie hands its audience a kind of coded confession of guilt—a perfect auto-critique, however accidental—on a silver platter. In The Goldfinch, that moment arrives early on, in the backroom of a Greenwich Village vintage furniture shop. Here, a sad-eyed antiques dealer, Hobie (Jeffrey Wright),…

One of the many joys of Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers is watching these women watch each other work. As the characters turn the tables on a system that seems rigged against them, there’s a palpable awe and mutual respect between colleagues who do their jobs and do it well. We were lucky enough to score a few minutes with…