Movie Reviews

The Story: A man’s corpse is resurrected and turned into a cyborg super-soldier by his implausibly attractive scientist wife, after which he kills everyone in his path on a quest to rescue her from the telekinetic albino oligarch that abducted her. Seriously, that’s what this is about. The Lowdown: Ninety minutes of nausea-inducing shaky cam…

The Story: Documentary about Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic Jonathan Gold. The Lowdown: Appealing, pleasant, thoroughly entertaining portrait of the food critic and the city he covers.

The Story: After running afoul of the law, a former billionaire tries to rehabilitate her image with the help of a former underling. The Lowdown: Another noisy, grating comedic vehicle for Melissa McCarthy. Even if you enjoy her onscreen presence, there’s little to latch onto with something so idiotically obnoxious.

In Brief: The Seventh Seal is probably the single biggest old warhorse of art-house cinema. But there’s a reason it achieved that status: It’s so damned good. When it first appeared in 1957, it was not at all like anything else that had come before it. It wasn’t even like Bergman. Oh, sure, there had been…

The Story: An investment broker takes an unusual path to dealing with the death of his wife in a car wreck. The Lowdown: A surprising movie that manages to blend warmth, satire, casual absurdity and melodrama into a satisfying whole. One of the most appealing films to come our way this year.

The Story: A Chicago family comes into money through illicit means and moves to a Beverly Hills McMansion just in time to encounter the premise from a completely different movie. The Lowdown: The Purge-meets-The Beverly Hillbillies-meets incomprehensible inanity; this is a very bad film that’s at least strange enough to keep things interesting in places.

The Story: Tense war drama about the moral implications of drone warfare. The Lowdown: Effective, often powerful drama  — that perhaps tends to try too hard not to take sides — that benefits from splendid performances by Helen Mirren, Aaron Paul, Barkhad Abdi and, especially, the late Alan Rickman in a final performance worthy of…

The Story: A teacher, in trouble after discussing Jesus in her classroom, turns to a passionate lawyer to save her job and stick up for her faith. The Lowdown: More faith-based proselytizing, this time styled as a dreary, languid courtroom drama. Solely for the converted.

In Brief: Laurence Olivier's Henry V (1944) — or to give it its full title, The Chronicle History of King Henry the Fift with His Battell Fought at Agincourt in France — marked Olivier's directorial debut, the first Technicolor production of a Shakespeare play and the only time a Shakespeare play has been used as…

In Brief: The movie year of 1941 was probably the best one that director George Waggner — a solid craftsman, if not a particularly inspired one — ever had. In rapid succession, he knocked out Horror Island, Man Made Monster and The Wolf Man. There’s no doubt that the last in the list is his best known, but, in all…

The Story: Disjointed biopic of country singer Hank Williams. The Lowdown: Tom Hiddleston is terrific in the lead role, while Elizabeth Olsen lends good support in this handsome film. Unfortunately, the film housing these performances has one of the most poorly structured scripts of all time.

In Brief: If you don’t know Jean Renoir, it’s time you did, and Grand Illusion (1937) is the best place to start. Generally considered an anti-war film — and it is one — Grand Illusion is really too many things to be neatly pigeonholed by genre. It’s a World War I story — essentially a story about French prisoners…

The Story: Dealing with the stress of an angsty teen, Toula must help her parents throw their own big, fat Greek wedding when they realize their wedding certificate was never signed. The Lowdown: About all this genteel comedy has going for it is its general good-naturedness, with the rest of the film a dull mishmash…

The Story: A simple story about Batman being on the outs with Superman that's overly complicated in order to bring in other characters and the requisite mayhem and property damage. The Lowdown: It's neither as bad as it's been painted nor as good as one might hope. It takes itself too seriously and so isn't…

In Brief: In a fit of culture, the Warner Bros. decided to go full-on prestige in 1935 by hiring in one of the most controversial — but exceedingly famous — interpreters of Shakespeare to bring his production of A Midsummer Night's Dream to the screen with the idea of using it as an artistic showcase for…

In Brief: The name Deanna Durbin may not be immediately familiar to today’s audiences, but she practically carried Universal Pictures single-handedly between 1936 and 1941 — and she remained one of their biggest stars until she retired from movies in 1949. She had an operatic voice and was that rarest of things: a completely appealing…

The Story: Traveling through a post-apocalyptic wasteland, our heroine Tris discovers more about the dystopian world she lives in. The Lowdown: More self-serious, noisy, sci-fi nonsense, only with no proper ending and more big-name cast members wasted.

The Story: An older woman falls in love with a co-worker who is at least half her age. The Lowdown: A touching, charming, often funny (with an undercurrent of pain) film that showcases its star, and indeed the whole cast. A must-see? Close enough as makes no difference.

The Story: A young girl with an incurable gastro-intestinal disorder inexplicably recovers after falling into a tree. The Lowdown: You can spare yourself two hours of Jennifer Garner grimacing by watching the trailer, as it covers nearly every significant story beat.

In Brief: In what is perhaps the greatest line of ballyhoo ever penned, the trailer for Erle C. Kenton’s The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) assures us, “Here is drama completely strange!” Unfortunately, there’s not much all that strange about it — unless you’ve never seen a Frankenstein movie. This is the movie where the once-great series dropped…

In Brief: What once made Luis Buñuel’s Simon of the Desert (1965) a favorite of university film classes — its 45-minute running time being perfect for one class session — has since conspired to make it one of the filmmaker’s more obscure works. After all, 45 minutes is an awkward fit for just about anything other than a classroom.…