Focus Features

There’s poetry in every corner and crevice of The Outfit. From the look of the film to its structure to the characters to the performances to the written words, its being creates a picture of unspoken emotions and intent, eventually laid bare with a denouement that simultaneously confounds and delights. Even the title itself is […]

Paul Thomas Anderson’s films are marvelous for one reason: the offhand way random events happen in his movies. A suicide jumper gets shot while falling? Yup. A drug deal where the tension is augmented by a preteen kid chucking firecrackers around a house? In Anderson’s world, it’s an ordinary nighttime scene in Los Angeles. A […]

It could be said that Last Night in Soho is director/co-writer Edgar Wright’s homage to the color-saturated Italian horror and Giallo films of the 1960s and 1970s. A naïve girl is accepted into a school in a distant city, whereupon she is embroiled in a mystery reaching far beyond her ken; this is essentially the […]

Reason to watch: Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Shannon Gripping for a stint, but overall curiously pieced together, “Nocturnal Animals” is a decent thriller adapted from the novel “Tony and Susan” by Austin Wright. Having not read the book, I have no doubt that the translation to celluloid was a difficult undertaking—director Tom Ford’s production has its […]

Why the Laika animation studio isn’t a name on everyone’s lips like Disney’s Pixar is a total mystery to me. Since 2009, they’ve put out stunningly-animated films using a terrific blend of computer backgrounds and stop motion. Don’t think Ray Harryhausen, though; think more lifelike, truly defined and smoother than Jason and the Argonauts. What […]

Zach Braff stars as Aidan Bloom, a struggling actor whose one success in a shampoo ad has him clinging to the notion that he’ll one day land a career-changing role in a TV show. His wife Sarah (Kate Hudson) grows quietly embittered as she works a soul-sucking job in order to pay the bills while […]