Movies Archive | Page 22 of 121

Ready Player One

Quality eye candy

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle

I put off seeing this movie, vaguely remembering its 1995 predecessor as a lame SFX extravaganza elevated to the (barely) watchable level by Robin Williams. But I’m here to tell you I had a ball. Four stereotypical US teens are sucked into the title board game and assume adult avatars, none of which remotely resembles […]

Citizen Jane: Battle for the City

In the mid-20th century, “city planners” such as Robert Moses, gleefully tore down New York City’s wonderful neighborhoods in favor of utopian housing schemes and massive expressways. The buildings would become known as “the projects,” and look how that turned out. They would’ve destroyed the rest of the city were it not for writer and […]

Red Sparrow

A Bolshoi prima ballerina breaks a leg and is (naturally) sent to a government whore school to learn how to use her wiles as weapons. While Jennifer Lawrence’s sheer star presence can make any film compulsively watchable, I’m kind of disappointed she chose to take on such a pointless, pervy actioner built on a theme […]

Darkest Hour

But Gary Oldman’s brightest

The Only Living Boy in New York

Grating coming-of-age navel gazer

Maudie

A work of art

The Shape of Water

Go ahead and dive in

Lucky

Goodbye, Harry

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

With no intelligent life on any of them

Downsizing

Too much and not enough

Coco

Animated empowerment

Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House

Political procedural

The Greatest Showman

How about an adequate one?

The Big Sick

Serious cross-cultural hilarity

Whisky Galore

Twee and tweedy set

A Perfect Day

Wit and wisdom in a war zone

The Dark Tower

Failed fantasy

Lady Bird

Greta Gerwig has been my favorite actor since Frances Ha. Now she’s my favorite director. The coming-of-age dramedy is about as worked-out a genre as they come. So when a film this honest comes along and makes it all fresh and surprising, it’s worth a look. The actor/writer/director’s keenly observed, semi-autobiographical story of growing up […]

The Commuter

A freshly fired, cash-strapped, ex-NYC-cop insurance salesman is anonymously offered, during his homeward commute, a ton of money to locate on the train a possible witness to a murder. It’s an offer he can’t refuse. He then realizes, considerably later than even the dullest audience member, that he has been set up. And he’s going […]

Unlocked

An expert but spiritually wounded CIA interrogator, or “unlocker” (Noomi Rapace), realizes she’s being set up, and has to run for her life, negotiating a veritable forest of lame plot twists and espionage-flick tropes (digital readouts counting down, etc.) to prevent a biological attack on London. The supporting cast includes a man-bunned Orlando Bloom and […]

Eye on Juliet

Robot spiders to the rescue

The Boss Baby

Baby formula

Tomb Raider

Watching someone else play a video game

The Post

Weaponizing nostalgia

TICKET LOTTERY: Hamletmachine Performance

Win two free tickets to Hamletmachine! The experimental art group OM-2 revives its performance of this postmodernist drama after a decade-long hiatus. Tickets are available for three performances at the Nippori Sunny Hall: March 22 (Thursday) at 7:30pm March 23 (Friday) at 7:30pm March 24 (Saturday) at 3:30pm Enter your name and email address for the chance […]