Film Reviews

If you listened to War for the Planet of the Apes with your eyes closed, the music alone would let you know you were in the presence of a grand adventure. 

Spider-Man: Homecoming is delightfully smart, genially aware of itself and terrifically likeable. Only now is this series coming of age. 

Baby Driver is a time-capsule testament to the primacy of music and movement in contemporary life; the beat is both the medium and the message.

Maybe the title of The Big Sick could be improved, but everything else conspires to make this romantic comedy a cockeyed classic. It's hilariously hyperverbal, yet wonderfully heartfelt.

Cars 3 is about Lightning McQueen. This time the hotshot is a faded champion who yearns to win one more race. He's an intriguing hero for young audiences, a living legend and incipient geezer struggling to compete against a new breed of race cars.

"The Mummy" goes beyond defying comprehension. It's truly incomprehensible, and I have some questions about it.

Wonder Woman puts the super back in movie heroism, and the Woman herself, as played by Gal Gadot, is the dazzling embodiment of female empowerment.

The action sequences of Alien: Covenant give satisfaction, and the supersmart, superambitious android element provides ample food for thought and plenty of cause for worry, given what machine-learning already is and soon it soon will be.

A new film called Risk could hardly be more timely. 

Director Lydia Tenaglia traces Jeremiah Tower's progression from Chez Panisse to the 1984 opening of his own restaurant, Stars, the spectacularly successful San Francisco brasserie where he reigned as a new model of celebrity chef until 1999, when the place closed. .

Sense, or logic, is not what turns out vast audiences for The Fate of the Furious. It's the cars, of course...

Joe Morgenstern says Their Finest is one of the smartest, funniest and most surprising movies he's seen in years, proof of the power of two stories artfully told.

Not all wonderful books are meant to be mainstream fiction films.

Taken on its own terms, as a kinetic thriller, Life is lively enough for a while. 

More is less in Disney’s live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast — so much less that this crazily cluttered venture in industrial entertainment betrays the essence of what made the 1991 animated feature a beloved classic.