Ben Is Back isn’t the year’s first American drama about a teenage drug addict and the parent agonizing over how to help him. Two months ago, Timothée Chalamet and Steve Carell acted out that same scenario in Beautiful Boy, a film so committed to capturing, in agonizing detail, each step (and misstep) on the road to…

Movie trailers can be misleading. Their primary function is to sell us something, to get asses in seats any way they can. Sometimes, that entails making a film look like something it’s not, as when a moody arthouse crime pastiche is passed off as a de facto Transporter sequel. (Newsflash: Advertising isn’t always…

Say this and little else for the new Robin Hood movie: It’s less of a self-serious slog than the last Robin Hood movie. Ridley Scott’s 2010 take on the legendary bandit leeched all the spritely appeal from its centuries-old material, fashioning a dour and dubiously “historical” origin story for the Merry Men. It was…

In the damnably nice middlebrow race dramedy Green Book, two unlikely travel companions—one black and urbane, the other white and uncouth—pile into a gleaming turquoise Cadillac and venture off into the Deep South, bickering and bonding and gradually closing the gaping cultural chasm between them. It’s a time warp of…

Steve McQueen’s Widows is the type of movie that Hollywood too rarely bankrolls anymore: a mid-budget crackerjack crowdpleaser for adults. McQueen, the British director and video artist who made Hunger, Shame, and 12 Years A Slave, has never applied his muscular, fluid camerawork and ease with performers to a script…

There are only six levels in the new Hitman game, but each is a world unto itself: elaborately mapped, highly detailed, roamed by as many as a couple hundred non-player characters, the guards and gardeners blissfully going about their daily business, walking their own routes, tending to their own narrowly defined jobs…

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes Of Grindelwald wastes no time at all ushering viewers back into the “Wizarding World” of Harry Potter. Those very words, in fact, appear right on the screen, in big letters, floating into view seconds after the Warner Bros. logo—sheening and monochromatic, to tease the stormier nature of…

The Old West is Coen country. Senselessly brutal and rich with rapscallions, it’s a backlot backdrop perfectly suited to the preoccupations of these sibling movie brats. Yet for all the ways the genre has crept into their catalog—a sagely cowboy narrator, an oater-within-the-film, sprawling frontiers of the…

Patrick Wang doesn’t just write, direct, produce, and sometimes star in his own films. He self-distributes them, too—a choice made out of a desire for control, perhaps, but also maybe out of an understanding that his work doesn’t fit any boutique “brand,” any Fox Searchlight yellow or moody A24 blue. Born and raised…