Latest in Reviews

How many Vietnamese films have you ever seen? Or even heard of? For a heavily populated country that was controlled during roughly the first half of the 20th century by one of the most cinematically advanced nations, France, it's surprising that Vietnam has such a thin history where film is concerned. The only…

Art, love, jealousy and freedom are themes at the heart of Tove, the biopic of Swedish-Finnish Moomins creator Tove Jansson (Alma Pöysti). Her drawings of the hippo-like Moomintrolls became world famous, graduating from books and comic strips to theater, TV series, movies and even a theme park. But the Tove we meet in…

How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless critic. While no one will compare the 2017 comedy Paddington 2 to Shakespeare’s King Lear, the film recently suffered its own version of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, as its Rotten Tomatoes rating was dinged by a lone negative critic crying in…

They're really back, for better or worse. Here's the skinny: If you are one of the millions of truly dedicated Friends fans out there, then the Friends: The Reunion special debuting Thursday on HBO Max is exactly the fix you have been craving since the NBC sitcom went off the air in 2004. However, if you don't have a…

The familiar vengeance payback genre has some goofy and entirely welcome top-spin applied to it in Anders Thomas Jensen’s Riders Of Justice. The Danish film also features a version of Mads Mikkelsen — currently at a career peak — that we've never seen before, with his handsome face hidden behind an Ozark-style full…

Suzanne Lindon writes, directs and stars in her impressive debut feature Spring Blossom (Seize Printemps), which was part of the special 2020 Cannes Film Festival Official Selection and releases in select U.S. theaters May 21 via KimStim Films after a European run. The daughter of French film actors Sandrine Kiberlain…

If you've felt physically trapped over the past 14 months, you'll feel right at home in Oxygen (Oxygène), a locked-in-a-box conceptual thriller that more or less succeeds almost entirely due to Mélanie Laurent's resourceful performance as a woman who has no idea why she's become trapped in a tiny cryogenic pod. The Ne…

V2 Escape From Hell plays like an old-fashioned, vibrantly propagandistic 1950s World War II thriller about how a daredevil Russian aviator thwarted Hitler's last-gasp attempt to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat during the final desperate months of combat. Visually, thanks to ever-advancing CGI, this is a pretty…

"Good to be back!" were the first words from Joe Biden tonight in his first address to a joint session of Congress, sort of. This probably wasn't the exuberant address to Congress that the creature of Congress thought he'd be giving when he first announced he was running for president for the third time in 2019. Yet…

The plight of Middle Eastern refugees awaiting asylum in the West is given a mordantly absurdist edge in Limbo, a tart socio-political tale in which the urgency of distant tragedies is siphoned into a timeless setting in the Outer Hebrides, where almost nothing ever happens. The result resembles a Samuel Beckett-like…

Director Zhang Yimou returns to theaters this weekend with Cliff Walkers, an espionage thriller set in 1930s China. It's a change of tone for the director of Shadow, House Of Flying Daggers and Hero, who also helmed Matt Damon-starrer The Great Wall in 2016. Based on a script by Quan Yongxian, Cliff Walkers opens in…

The 93rd Academy Awards had no host, no masks, no Zoom, and almost no audience. There's a lot of things the Oscars weren't tonight, but lackluster thankfully wasn't one of them overall. Hollywood's biggest night wasn't exactly the movie unto itself that producers Jesse Collins, Stacey Sher and Steven Soderbergh…