Movie Reviews

Life Itself, from the creator of This Is Us, launches two family stories on two different continents. It offers some lovely moments, but its grand ambitions are beyond its grasp.

Wash Westmoreland's biopic of a French literary lioness is well-acted, gorgeously mounted and weighed down with incongruously modern speeches about sexuality and gender.

The exquisite atmosphere and sense of foreboding that made John Bellairs' 1973 book a children's classic gets discarded in favor of a relentless riot of jump-scares and visual noise.

This by-the-numbers documentary misses a step by focusing on the late Gilda Radner's celebrity over her comedy, but it's effective when it lets her recently discovered journals do the talking.

First-time filmmaker RaMell Ross' camera captures fleeting moments in the lives of two black young men in rural Alabama, and refuses to supply us with context. We grow to care about them anyway.

Director/co-writer Shane Black's attempt to infuse snappy dialogue and dark humor into the alien-hunter franchise works until it, suddenly, doesn't. Blame a mess of a script and cheap-looking effects.

Emma Thompson stars as a British High Court judge who becomes embroiled in the life of a teenager brought before her, for reasons about which "it's hard to tell and harder to care."

Hulu's new series features Sean Penn as a veteran astronaut facing the personal sacrifice of deep space travel. Critic David Bianculli says the characters are explored just as deeply as outer space.