review movies

  There’s a brief transition early in the three hours of Japanese director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s astonishing “Drive My Car” where the wheels of the movie’s integral automobile morph into the spinning reels of a cassette tape in a recorder. For an instant, they fuse, almost as if the voice captured on that device functioned as the vehicle’s fuel. And in a sense it does, since that audio accompanies the driver like a sonic ghost mile after mile.  Understated in its extraordinary rewards, this is the second Hamaguchi-helmed feature released this year (the other being “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy”), which gleans its premise from one of Haruki Murakami’s short stories in the collection  Men Without Women . Selected as Japan’s entry for the Best International Feature Film Oscar—the first time the filmmaker’s work received the honor—“Drive My Car” marks his deserved breakthrough. Basking in post-coital serenity, actor and theater director Yûsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishij...

  Two decades after the attack on September 11th, filmmakers are grappling with the ugliness in how the CIA tried to get more information about future terrorist attacks, and the school of torture that followed.  Scott Z. Burns ’ “ The Report ” told of how whistleblowers started to realize the scope of torture in the War on Terror, and how much it did not work;  Paul Schrader ’s recent “ The Card Counter ” based its brooding nature on the psychological effects post-9/11 torture would have on the soldiers who enacted it. But as these filmmakers have sought a type of accountability, the stories of the tortured have received less visibility.   Enter Alex Gibney’s vigilant and infuriating “The Forever Prisoner,” which interviews real-life figures seen in those narratives—Daniel Jones, the FBI agent portrayed by Adam Driver in “The Report,” and someone who wore a black mask and did government-sanctioned torturing, as in “The Car...

  There’s a point relatively early in “Memoria,” the stunning new drama from  Apichatpong Weerasethakul , in which  Tilda Swinton ’s protagonist is trying to describe a sound that she’s been hearing in her head, leading to sleepless nights. She explains it to a technician and he presents her with an audio clip that tries to replicate it. I said out loud, “No, it’s earthier.” And then Tilda preceded to say almost  exactly the same thing . I’m not trying to say I’m psychic, only that I was  deeply  on this film’s wavelength, and I think Weerasethakul, also known as “ Joe ,” would like that story.  Joe wants his films to connect in that manner, not through plot or even character, but through experience. He wants to question how we engage with motion pictures, and, by extension, life itself. His “Memoria” will reportedly never have a physical release, only playing in theaters in a traveling road show, going across the country for years, one week ...

  It takes a certain kind of touch, a populist brilliance, to know that “Milk was a bad choice” could help launch a comedy empire.  Adam McKay  had that when he scoured through the many improvised lines of “Anchorman,” and co-created what will probably be known as the last movement of American blockbuster comedy. And he continued that touch with the unmitigated triumph “ The Big Short ,” venturing to educate moviegoers about the housing crisis using movie stars and furious monologues. But  McKay  is mightily thwarted by the larger scope of “Don’t Look Up,” a hybrid of his comedic and dramatic instincts that only dreams of being insightful about social media, technology, global warming, celebrity, and in general, human existence. A disastrous movie, “Don’t Look Up” shows McKay as the most out of touch he’s ever been with what is clever, or how to get his audience to care.   If “Don’t Look Up” deserves any award, it’s for the work of its casting director...

  It's hard to figure out at first what is going on with Leda. The woman with the symbolic Yeatsian name is a professor and translator, taking a brief vacation in Greece, and looking forward to relaxation in the sun. However, almost immediately upon her arrival in the small seaside town, things start to go strange. Leda is the center of the strangeness. Is she generating the strangeness, or is it the world that's strange? Why are her reactions to things so intense? Why is she so paranoid and awkward? What is going on with her? "The Lost Daughter," an adaptation of Elena Farrante's 2006 novel of the same name, is Maggie Gyllenhaal's directorial debut, and what a debut it is. Harrowing, unpredictable, painful, confrontational, this is a movie for grown-ups. One of the most extraordinary things about "The Lost Daughter" is Gyllenhaal's dogged resistance to explaining the mystery of Leda. Why does Leda do what she does? Well, you learn a lot of the b...

THE BEST HORROR MOVIES OF 2020, RANKED  Over the past year, we’ve collected every Fresh and Certified Fresh horror movie with at least 20 reviews, creating our guide to the best horror movies of 2020, ranked by Tomatometer. Before the pandemic shut theaters down, horror was off to a decent start, on pace to keep up with the long strides the genre had made in the 2010s.  The Invisible Man  resurrected the Universal monster movie (and at the fraction of what the 2017  Mummy  cost), while  Color Out of Space  was the best H.P. Lovecraft adaptation since  Re-Animator . Sheltered in place, audiences turned to streaming, quickly raising quarantine-shot  Host  and Spain’s social class-dissecting  The Platform  into word-of-mouth hits. Streaming helped horror movies with diverse themes and origins get more attention than they would’ve during normal distribution times, like the Canadian First Nations zombie film  Blood Quantum , th...