The John Wick movies have a hotel, The Continental, that’s exclusively for assassins, where a code of conduct (e.g., no “working” on the premises) is strictly enforced. So fascinating is the society hinted at (they even use their own currency) that a TV series about The Continental is in production for Starz. Unfortunately for Hotel Artemis, […]

Remember how Danny Ocean needed 10 friends (and then 11, and then 12) to pull off his heists? In Ocean’s Eight, his sister, Debbie (Sandra Bullock), only needs six collaborators (plus a seventh, eventually, as spoiled by the title) to perpetrate an impossible theft of priceless jewels. Are women better at multitasking than men are? […]

I didn’t grow up with Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (or Sesame Street, for that matter). We didn’t have cable yet when I was that age, and our TV antenna didn’t pick up the local PBS affiliate. Yet even without a personal connection or a sense of nostalgia, I had a lump in my throat for most of […]

Would you like to watch Toni Collette have a nervous breakdown for two hours? Hereditary is many things — a haunting story about a disintegrating family, a masterfully directed nightmare by first-timer Ari Aster, a pants-besoiling horror film — but it’s also Collette’s highlight reel, full of intense emotions and monologues that she performs with devastating […]

Ian McEwan’s novel On Chesil Beach and the movie based on it (which he also wrote) tell a story set in 1962 England that could only work as a period piece, for it is based on the premise that society expects newlyweds to be virgins, and that many of them actually are. The big-screen debut of […]

Remember the Robert Redford movie All Is Lost, where he was stranded at sea? Adrift, with teen-romance veterans Shailene Woodley (The Fault in Our Stars) and Sam Claflin (Me Before You) lost in the Pacific on a storm-damaged yacht, is like that, only boring. It’s based on real events recounted in Tami Ashcraft’s book Sky […]

If the absence of Johnny Knoxville’s Jackass has left a concussion-shaped hole in your life, it may be partially filled by Action Point, a juvenile comedy with Knoxville as the owner of a rickety amusement park who tries to compete with a fancy new park by embracing what makes his unique and removing all the safety […]

Upgrade is an offbeat futuristic techno-thriller in the tradition of B-movies about scientists tampering in God’s domain, made with enthusiasm (by Saw and Insidious creator Leigh Whannell) from the spare parts of other sci-fi stories. It has some clumsy dialogue and melodrama, but it also has enough tongue-in-cheek ingenuity and kinetic energy to compensate for it. We are […]

“This is not based on a true story,” say the onscreen titles at the beginning of American Animals. “This is a true story.” A bold assertion, but writer-director Bart Layton, whose previous film was the unbelievably engrossing documentary Impostor, makes a strong case for himself with his narrative debut, an account of a 2004 incident […]