In “Darkest hour,” what Gary Oldman’s Churchill has to contend with in a time of war reminded me of what a newspaper editor does: tense negotiations, the reworking of sentences, an overarching need to get the message out, loudly and clearly. The real context of the story, the history, is, evidently, a very different one from this. In the early forties European countries were falling like dominoes as Hitler’s panzer division closed in

Growing up, one remembers longing for our cinema to become more realistic, or at the very least a little less ridiculous. At one stage, virtually every film made was a lost-and-found potboiler that featured more or less the same dialogues. We have got our wish to a certain extent. The films of today try harder to tell a single story, populate them with characters that go beyond Kishan and Bishan, two friends who became enemies for a while until one

By now, film adaptations based on the oeuvre of the two most prolific British writers of crime fiction, Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, form a respectable body. Of the latter, probably the best-known work remains “Murder on the Orient Express.” Today comes a new version by the, himself now almost venerable, Brit actor, Kenneth Branagh. From the get-go in this iteration, the actor/director makes no attempt to shake the

Do sleeping dogs lie forever? The question can be asked about Peter Landesman’s biopic of Mark Felt, the FBI agent who leaked drop after drop of damning information regarding the Watergate burglary to Bod Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post, until they turned into a flood that drowned Nixon and acolytes in 1974. If one relies on the story as it is told here the dogs will indeed not wake. Mark Felt

"Brad's Status" is one of the better films I've seen in a long time. Mike White has crafted a movie, and a hero, that is sad, funny, smart, maddening and 100% human. Ben Stiller has been criticized for overexposure, usually when he appears in four junky slapstick comedies in one season, but I think audiences will want more of him after the one-two punch of "Brad's Status" and the (almost nearly as excellent)

Some time ago I attended a screening of “A girl walks home alone at night” in Paris, where I'm based. The film felt novel and contrarian enough to warrant attention. Its diminutive director, Ana Lily Amirpour, present at the screening, appeared to me like one of independent cinema's great new hopes, a stentorian counterpoint to the languid cinema of Sofia Coppola. The Q&A afterward was a little perplexing, though. A squeamish Amirpour stood

I know, I know, you’re jaded. You’ve seen it all in hundreds, nay, thousands of movies. War movies, survival movies, hanging-on-by-the skin-of-your-teeth movies, abandon-hope movies, never-lose-hope movies. You’ve also seen admirable or despicable actions from soldiers, officers, and ordinary civilians. But trust me, you have never seen all of that brought together in a package such as Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk.”

Can we fight evil? Save our lovely planet from ghouls such as Monsanto and other purveyors of various poisons into GMO plants and animals? Can the good people win? Can we save the human race while preventing our animals from being seen only in terms of sirloin or chops? Such is the theme of “Okja,” a Netlix film streaming on the video channel (and causing much distress at the recent Cannes film festival when the jury president

Heading to cinema screens July 21st is "Kuso," a nightmarish B-movie that depicts the aftermath of The Big One in Los Angeles. The viewer is made to experience aftershocks through TV screens and apocalypse-tinged vignettes of the twisted lives of the survivors. It's like David Cronenberg married David Firth and together they gave birth to Ren & Stimpy V.2. "Kuso" is a little chaotic at times. The film comprises about seven storylines

Some one hundred thirty years after her death in the house in Amherst, Pennsylvania where she lived as a recluse dressed in white and scribbling poetry in the middle of the night, do we know more about Emily Dickinson than her ever-puzzled circle did? Books about her would make a hefty library, scholars who have spent a lifetime researching her would fill a mid-size conference room, her own poetry, some two thousand