Opinion

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There’s something profoundly melancholy about Disney returning, in its present state of creative exhaustion and corporate decadence, to The Little Mermaid — the nucleus from which the entire Disney renaissance exploded, in a way along with everything that has followed. The last time Disney was artistically lost to the degree that it is now ... read more

The creepiness of these incidents contrasts jarringly with the fond mythology around Murray as a benignly whimsical spirit, even an unlikely sage. Murray’s well-established penchant for unpredictable behavior both among his peers and with random people in public ranges from bizarre, almost surreal performance art — for example, shouting nonsense at passersby like “There’s ... read more

The movie year 2022 was a year of memory and identity, with one film after another exploring how memory both gives us access to our past, to our roots, and also distorts and obscures the past. At least five notable films (including three of my favorites) are from filmmakers drawing on childhood memories of ... read more

The first two Creed films were “legacyquels” in the strict sense given by Matt Singer in coining the term: movies “in which beloved aging stars reprise classic roles and pass the torch to younger successors.” By this definition, 2006’s Rocky Balboa, coming 16 years after Rocky V, was not a legacyquel; it could be ... read more

In cinema history, the one science-fiction work that, so to speak, flung open the stable doors for audiences and later filmmakers was Stanley Kubrick’s towering 1968 classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, released 55 years ago. Science fiction in movies is essentially as old as cinema itself, and 1950s movies like The Day the Earth Stood ... read more

There are two things Avatar: The Way of Water does supremely well — more about that in a bit — but let’s acknowledge up front that, in all the ways Avatar was mediocre, The Way of Water represents no great step forward. The Na’vi cast is larger and more diverse, and there are conflicts ... read more

The instigating incident in Bruges is an ambush in a confessional. Ray’s first assignment as a hitman is to murder a priest, whom he pretends to approach for confession before gunning him down—in the process accidentally killing a young boy waiting to confess such innocent shortcomings as moodiness and badness at math. Calvary opens with ... read more

The Rescue: The right stuff The Rescue is from husband-and-wife documentarians Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, whose Oscar-winning Free Solo was also about a devotee of an extreme sport, solo rock climbing without ropes or safety equipment. The Rescue is about a massive, coordinated effort both to keep the boys alive long enough to ... read more

Many gods, many afterlifes — at least for some In particular, three of the most recent MCU movies — Eternals, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and now Thor: Love and Thunder — mark a turning point by dealing overtly with religious themes in ways avoided by earlier MCU releases. In Love and Thunder ... read more

Perhaps that’s a helpful point of entry to a project like The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, the ambitious new Amazon Prime Video series from creator-showrunners JD Payne and Patrick McKay. Set during the Second Age in the build-up to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, it’s a fundamentally ... read more

Episode 3 (“Adar”) introduces us to Númenor in its glory, while episode 4 (“The Great Wave”) begins to presage Númenor’s downfall in connection with a strategically deployed Tolkienesque device. A sword is placed in Elendil’s hands in episode 3; is this Narsil, the blade that will be broken? The reason for the suspicious hostility ... read more

As is typical for his films, Farhadi’s characters generally act in reasonable, understandable ways, given their perspective, interests, and knowledge at the time. You can see how our embattled protagonist begins to feel as if no good deed goes unpunished, but you can also see how Farhadi cross-examines the very idea of a rising ... read more

Right to the end, there’s a sense that the showrunners are trying to keep us guessing, even attempting an eleventh-hour fakeout, before revealing (or at least heavily implying) that, well, there was never much of a mystery in the first place. Well, then, why try to make a puzzle out of it? Mystery ... read more

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The film is The Way, a family passion project starring Martin Sheen and written and directed by his son, Emilio Estevez, and the pilgrimage route is called the Camino de Santiago or the Way of St. James. The story follows a lapsed Catholic named Tom (Sheen) whose estranged son (briefly played by Estevez) unexpectedly dies ... read more