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Cate Blanchett’s searing performance in “Tár” left such an indelible impression that, for a while in late 2022/early 2023, people actually thought Lydia Tár was a real person. She is not: The egotistical and tormented conductor is entirely fictional, the vivid creation of writer-director Todd Field. However, many passionate and dedicated female conductors exist, and […]

In a big city, avoiding eye contact is a survival tool. Looking at the floor, looking down and to the left, a thousand-yard stare that looks straight through whoever is cramming their body into your personal space at that moment: all are necessary to maintain some level of dignity in crowded spaces. The characters in

“Longing” is a remake of an award-winning Israeli film by the same writer/director, Savi Gabizon. It could just as well be called “Grief,” or perhaps the Portuguese term “Saudade,” sometimes described as the feeling of loss for something you never had and never will. Richard Gere plays Daniel Bloch, a never-married, very successful businessman who

I’m not coming out and accusing the writers of “Bad Boys: Ride or Die” of using A.I., a touchy subject in Hollywood these days. But if a computer had written this blockbuster sequel, it wouldn’t turn out much different. Serving as a more direct sequel to 2020’s “Bad Boys for Life” than people might expect,

One of my great great great grandfathers fought for the Union and survived the Battle of Antietam. After his infantry unit was wiped out, he hid under a heap of corpses. As a child, I often found myself thinking about a person doing what he did and then going on to live a normal life,

Daisy Ridley battles jellyfish and the patriarchy with equal pluck and aplomb in “Young Woman and the Sea.” Ridley stars in this compelling biographical drama as Trudy Ederle, the first woman to swim across the English Channel. Ederle accomplished this feat in 1926 nearly a century before the open-water swimming triumph depicted in last year’s

Lance Oppenheim’s three-part HBO docuseries “Ren Faire” walks that fine line between mocking and celebrating its incredibly unique subjects. I told a friend just now that I was reviewing a docuseries about a “Succession”-esque power struggle at a Renaissance fair, and he said, “So, a comedy?” Yes and no. While aspects of “Ren Faire” are

The issue of the spoiler remains a critical one in cinematic discourse. At this moment, it weighs on this reviewer particularly heavily. “What You Wish For,” a picture written and directed by Nicholas Tomnay and starring Nick Stahl, is one that I went into relatively cold, and that contributed significantly to my enjoyment of the

Pablo Berger’s “Robot Dreams” is a lovely fable about partnership and imagination, a movie that uses the form of animated cinema to tell a story in a way that couldn’t be possible in any other medium. Without a word of dialogue, the director of “Blancanieves” casts a spell, crafting a film that is often truly

The most fascinating thing about Chris Nash’s hyperviolent slasher experiment “In a Violent Nature” is that it’s not scary. At least, not in the way that the “Friday the 13th“-esque splatter flicks he’s clearly riffing on used to be. There are no jump scares, few bouts of high-wire tension, and no ambiguity about who the