John Podhoretz

John Podhoretz on what makes a movie stand the test of time.

New movie approaches the grisly story non-ideologically.

Why is Steven Spielberg devoting so much of his time to making cartoons? Ready Player One, his mammoth new movie, is the third film he's made since 2011 using motion-capture animation. The first two—The Adventures of Tintin and The BFG—were simultaneously hyperactive and dispirited. Spielberg is…

Why is Steven Spielberg devoting so much of his time to making cartoons? Ready Player One, his mammoth new movie, is the third film he's made since 2011 using motion-capture animation. The first two—The Adventures of Tintin and The BFG—were simultaneously hyperactive and dispirited. Spielberg is…

The Death of Stalin is a blacker-than-black comedy about the members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and how they jockey for power after the demise of Joseph Vissarionovich in 1953. The movie is sometimes gaspingly hilarious—and at all times audacious and…

Rejected by more than two dozen publishers in the early 1960s, A Wrinkle in Time was itself a work of its own time and entirely out of time—a sophisticated and original intellectual coming-of-age story featuring speculative science fiction, anti-Communist dystopia, and Christian hermeneutics. There…

Rejected by more than two dozen publishers in the early 1960s, A Wrinkle in Time was itself a work of its own time and entirely out of time—a sophisticated and original intellectual coming-of-age story featuring speculative science fiction, anti-Communist dystopia, and Christian hermeneutics. There…

It's rare—vanishingly rare—to get the feeling in a movie theater that the people who made the film you’re seeing know exactly what they’re doing, know exactly what they’re trying to achieve scene by scene, know exactly what plot they’re telling, know exactly the characters they’re putting on…

Black Panther is the least superhero-y of the Marvel superhero movies. T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), its protagonist, gets some unearthly abilities from drinking the juice of a plant, but I can’t tell you what they are really, and the movie is delightfully uninterested in exploring them. What’s more…

Over the weekend Black Panther grossed an astonishing $218 million at the box office in spite of the fact—or perhaps because—it is the least superhero-y of the Marvel superhero movies. T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), its protagonist, gets some unearthly abilities from drinking the juice of a plant,…

Who didn’t love Ron Howard’s Splash back in 1984? Tom Hanks falls in the ocean and nearly drowns but is rescued by the beautiful mermaid Daryl Hannah. She follows him to New York, and they have a romantic idyll until she’s captured by the authorities. “Nobody said love’s perfect,” says Tom’s…

The Post is about a little-known and relatively minor incident in the annals of newspapering—how the Washington Post made itself a player in the Pentagon Papers story, the biggest scoop of 1971, after it was beaten to the punch by the New York Times. And it merges that account with a female…

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is a “reboot,” whatever that means, of a 1995 Robin Williams movie about kids magically transported inside the world of a board game. Sony Studios knew that the new Jumanji was likely to be a hit from the reaction of preview audiences, but no one expected it would…

The most potent form of nostalgia is for a time you never knew in a place you do and imagine was at its peak before you came along. For me, that would be the 1950s in New York City, set to the cool, light strain of the Dave Brubeck Quartet playing Paul Desmond’s “Take Five.” I can never get enough…

Enough with the whiny movie critics complaining about the new Star Wars movie. Like them, I was fully prepared to hate the thing when I arrived at the screening, but that prejudice was overcome by the movie’s wondrous look and by its fascinating, multilayered plot.

Enough with the whiny movie critics complaining about the new Star Wars movie. Like them, I was fully prepared to hate the thing when I arrived at the screening, but that prejudice was overcome by the movie’s wondrous look and by its fascinating, multilayered plot.

The propulsively entertaining but problematic new movie I, Tonya reminds us that it’s been nearly a quarter-century since the figure skater Nancy Kerrigan was whacked on the back of the knee by a baton-wielding goon. The attack was the outcome of an insane white-trash conspiracy to give Kerrigan’s…

Darkest Hour is a movie about the first three weeks of Winston Churchill’s premiership in May 1940, and it is balderdash. In a razor-sharp National Review critique, Kyle Smith takes out after the movie for shrinking Churchill “down to a more manageable size” by portraying him as undergoing an…

Last summer, to prepare for the upcoming movie version, I reread Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. Christie was the bestselling writer of the 20th century and Murder on the Orient Express is one of her most famous works. But I found it almost agonizingly tedious. It reads more like…

If I tell you that Martin McDonagh is one of the most imaginative writers of our time, I expect you will immediately think he writes science fiction or fantasy—because the word “imaginative” has now devolved into a subset of the fantastic, the surreal, the unearthly. That is not the case with…

We are living through the golden age of the cinema of Sacramento. Oh, you didn’t know there was such a thing? There is. It’s new. Very new. In 2015, the Sacramento radio station NOW 100.5 could find only eight movies filmed in part in Sacramento over the previous 30 years, and in all of them it was…

Half a century ago, fashionable young moviemakers looking for new ways to separate themselves from old Hollywood fuddy-duddies—and to épater la bourgeoisie even though it was that very bourgeoisie they needed to become rich and powerful—sank their teeth into the notions that America and capitalism…

Can there be such a thing as a great movie that is also unsatisfying? It would seem like a contradiction in terms. After all, how can something work when it doesn’t work? And yet it does happen. The early Marx Brothers and Woody Allen pictures are disastrous pieces of storytelling, but who cares…

Can there be such a thing as a great movie that is also unsatisfying? It would seem like a contradiction in terms. After all, how can something work when it doesn’t work? And yet it does happen. The early Marx Brothers and Woody Allen pictures are disastrous pieces of storytelling, but who cares…

The 1973 tennis match between the 29-year-old female champ Billie Jean King and the 55-year-old former champ Bobby Riggs was many things. It was one of the great “pseudo-events” of all time, fitting perfectly Daniel Boorstin’s definition in his 1962 book The Image as “dramatic performances in which…

In Brad’s Status, a 47-year-old man takes his 17-year-old son on a tour of Boston’s colleges. A onetime journalist whose award-winning website went bust during the financial meltdown, Brad Sloan runs a nonprofit in Sacramento that seeks to match donors with other worthy nonprofits. His wife works…

Stephen King’s It was the bestselling book of 1986 and the source material for an enormously successful two-part miniseries on ABC in 1990 that has been shown regularly on cable TV ever since. The ridiculously overlong novel reads like King is parodying himself; the miniseries is obvious and…

Charlize Theron first appears onscreen in her mostly terrific new action thriller, Atomic Blonde, trying to heal her wounded body in an ice bath. She has bruises all over her back. Her face is swollen, one of her eyes blackened. She pulls herself out of the tub, dresses laboriously, and limps into…

There are few events in the history of war comparable to the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from the French beach at Dunkirk in the late spring of 1940. It is an episode that repays close attention to its every aspect—the terrifying Nazi triumphs in combat that led to it, the halting…

There are few events in the history of war comparable to the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from the French beach at Dunkirk in the late spring of 1940. It is an episode that repays close attention to its every aspect—the terrifying Nazi triumphs in combat that led to it, the halting…

The Big Sick is a movie about a struggling comedian from a Pakistani family and his graduate-student waif of a girlfriend. They break up. She gets a mysterious infection and is put in a medically induced coma. He must deal with her parents, who are angry with him for the way he treated her, and his…

The Big Sick is a movie about a struggling comedian from a Pakistani family and his graduate-student waif of a girlfriend. They break up. She gets a mysterious infection and is put in a medically induced coma. He must deal with her parents, who are angry with him for the way he treated her, and his…

In the past 15 years, no fewer than seven movies have featured the character of Peter Parker, the Queens teenager who obtains powers from a radioactive spider bite. Tobey Maguire starred in three of them from 2002 to 2007; Andrew Garfield starred in two from 2012 to 2014; and after appearing in a…

In the past 15 years, no fewer than seven movies have featured the character of Peter Parker, the Queens teenager who obtains powers from a radioactive spider bite. Tobey Maguire starred in three of them from 2002 to 2007; Andrew Garfield starred in two from 2012 to 2014; and after appearing in a…

Automobiles, pop songs, and movies form a golden braid as eternal as the one that binds Gödel, Escher, and Bach. In 1980, the writer-director Paul Schrader released American Gigolo, whose first three minutes mostly feature shots of Richard Gere driving a black Mercedes convertible along the Pacific…

Automobiles, pop songs, and movies form a golden braid as eternal as the one that binds Gödel, Escher, and Bach. In 1980, the writer-director Paul Schrader released American Gigolo, whose first three minutes mostly feature shots of Richard Gere driving a black Mercedes convertible along the Pacific…

So, The Mummy. The question that bedevils me as I begin this review is how I can get to the end of it. Like Lucy in Peanuts, I am now counting words to see how quickly I can get to 700, which fills my slot here at The Weekly Standard. That was 53 words. I'm 8 percent of the way there. Can I make it?

So, The Mummy. The question that bedevils me as I begin this review is how I can get to the end of it. Like Lucy in Peanuts, I am now counting words to see how quickly I can get to 700, which fills my slot here at The Weekly Standard. That was 53 words. I'm 8 percent of the way there. Can I make it?

Wonder Woman is a superhero movie about a very attractive person who was fashioned out of clay. She resides on an island on which only women live. It is in the Mediterranean Sea but hidden behind a gigantic magical cloud. She leaves it and emerges into World War I-era Europe so that she can get…

Wonder Woman is a superhero movie about a very attractive person who was fashioned out of clay. She resides on an island on which only women live. It is in the Mediterranean Sea but hidden behind a gigantic magical cloud. She leaves it and emerges into World War I-era Europe so that she can get…

The Arthurian legends are among the most enduring stories in history. But when a $175 million film version casting Arthur as the lowlife foster son of a prostitute battling dragons and a campy Jude Law bombed at the box office, the reason for the movie's failure, in Hollywood's eyes, was simple:…

David Lynch has not made a movie or a television show in a decade. But his overwhelming talent—a talent all but unmatched in cinematic history—for transferring to the screen the jarring and unforgettable images (and sounds) that haunt his unconscious has not been dimmed by his absence. The first 4…

David Lynch has not made a movie or a television show in a decade. But his overwhelming talent—a talent all but unmatched in cinematic history—for transferring to the screen the jarring and unforgettable images (and sounds) that haunt his unconscious has not been dimmed by his absence. The first 4…

This discussion of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 will feature spoilers, so I don't want to hear any whining from any of you nerds. Read on, or don't; I get paid either way. Anyway, if you do complain, you're being silly because (a) this movie isn't a mystery, and (b) there aren't really any big…

This discussion of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 will feature spoilers, so I don't want to hear any whining from any of you nerds. Read on, or don't; I get paid either way. Anyway, if you do complain, you're being silly because (a) this movie isn't a mystery, and (b) there aren't really any big…

I was recently reading The Whole Truth and Nothing But, a 1963 memoir by the legendary gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, and I came across an interesting passage in which the producer Samuel Goldwyn (né Szmuel Gelbfisz) tells Hopper flatly, "You can't have a Jew playing a Jew. It wouldn't work on the…

It’s nearly 24 hours since I saw the new movie Colossal, and I'm not sure what I think of it. I've never seen anything like it, and trust me, neither have you—so for that reason alone Colossal might be worth your time. The question I can't seem to answer yet is whether its originality makes…

Until its final scene, there isn't a moment in the new live-action version of Beauty and the Beast that wasn't done better in the 1991 animated film from which it derives.

Until its final scene, there isn’t a moment in the new live-action version of Beauty and the Beast that wasn't done better in the 1991 animated film from which it derives.

I was, and I remain, one of the few people on this earth willing to state for the record that I thought the 2005 Peter Jackson version of King Kong was terrific. Indeed, I've long been of the opinion that most people who have condemned that picture didn't actually see it. It's long and…

I was, and I remain, one of the few people on this earth willing to state for the record that I thought the 2005 Peter Jackson version of King Kong was terrific. Indeed, I’ve long been of the opinion that most people who have condemned that picture didn't actually see it. It's long and…

The title of the new horror film Get Out alludes to a brilliant Eddie Murphy stand-up bit that is never mentioned in the movie—but a routine the African-American comedian Jordan Peele, who wrote and directed the movie, surely knows by heart. "I was watching movies like Poltergeist and Amityville…

The title of the new horror film Get Out alludes to a brilliant Eddie Murphy stand-up bit that is never mentioned in the movie—but a routine the African-American comedian Jordan Peele, who wrote and directed the movie, surely knows by heart. "I was watching movies like Poltergeist and Amityville…

The superhero movie Logan doesn't look, sound, or behave like any other superhero movie ever made. It's set around El Paso and the Mexican border town of Juarez, then in Oklahoma, and finally in North Dakota. It's dusty and gritty and mostly rural, entirely unlike the nine world-capital-hopping…

The superhero movie Logan doesn’t look, sound, or behave like any other superhero movie ever made. It's set around El Paso and the Mexican border town of Juarez, then in Oklahoma, and finally in North Dakota. It's dusty and gritty and mostly rural, entirely unlike the nine world-capital-hopping…

Well, of course Moonlight won the Academy Award. Who’s kidding whom in the year following the dreadful scandal known as #OscarsSoWhite? Sure, it looked like La La Land had it sewn up, so much so that no one batted an eye when it was mistakenly awarded Best Picture for two minutes at the…

A wonderful movie is a small miracle. So many things have to go right, and they usually don't. What is needed? A good story, and good actors, and a competent cinematographer, and a talented editor, and decent dialogue, and a sensible producer, and a director capable of mixing all the elements…

A wonderful movie is a small miracle. So many things have to go right, and they usually don’t. What is needed? A good story, and good actors, and a competent cinematographer, and a talented editor, and decent dialogue, and a sensible producer, and a director capable of mixing all the elements…

Every now and then a movie comes out of nowhere to surprise you. It’s usually a small-scale piece of genre work whose own producers are likely so relieved just to have it done and get it released that they don't really know they might have something special on their hands. Last year's big surprise…

Commentary editor John Podhoretz has a column in the New York Post on the wider implications—and brushed-over dangers—of the leaked information that felled former national security advisor Michael Flynn.

In my ongoing effort to perform the duties assigned to me as this magazine’s movie critic, I suffer for you. I see things you would not wish to see and tell you not to see them. Don't bother to thank me, even though you should. It's all part of the deal, the compact between us, forged over many…

Hidden Figures is a nice movie with a great subject that makes you feel good about America, reminds you how far we've come since the segregated and male-dominated days of the 1950s, and even reminds us that once we dreamed big about exploring the stars and going to the moon and all that kind of…

Hidden Figures is a nice movie with a great subject that makes you feel good about America, reminds you how far we've come since the segregated and male-dominated days of the 1950s, and even reminds us that once we dreamed big about exploring the stars and going to the moon and all that kind of…

There is a great American novel almost nobody has read: Theodore Dreiser's The Titan. It concerns a visionary man of business named Frank Cowperwood, and it's the story of how he helps turn Chicago into a major city by commandeering and then building its mass-transit system. Cowperwood is a…

There is a great American novel almost nobody has read: Theodore Dreiser’s The Titan. It concerns a visionary man of business named Frank Cowperwood, and it's the story of how he helps turn Chicago into a major city by commandeering and then building its mass-transit system. Cowperwood is a…

Seeing August Wilson’s play Fences on Broadway in 1987 was one of the highlights of my theatergoing life. This study of a 53-year-old garbageman named Troy Maxson—who struggles every moment to maintain his dignity and restrain the rage of a black man in 1950s Pittsburgh who was denied his chance to…

Seeing August Wilson’s play Fences on Broadway in 1987 was one of the highlights of my theatergoing life. This study of a 53-year-old garbageman named Troy Maxson—who struggles every moment to maintain his dignity and restrain the rage of a black man in 1950s Pittsburgh who was denied his chance to…

American TV has become the equivalent of India's Bollywood—an almost unimaginably prolific source of filmed entertainment. Bollywood produces more than a thousand movies a year, more than double Hollywood's output. Similarly, the networks and cable channels and streaming services have been…

American TV has become the equivalent of India’s Bollywood—an almost unimaginably prolific source of filmed entertainment. Bollywood produces more than a thousand movies a year, more than double Hollywood's output. Similarly, the networks and cable channels and streaming services have been…

How is the new Star Wars movie, Rogue One? How the hell should I know? Does it even matter what you or I think of it? Will any negative feelings we have prevent us and our children and our children’s children from seeing the next one, and the one after that, and the one after that—and on and on…

How is the new Star Wars movie, Rogue One? How the hell should I know? Does it even matter what you or I think of it? Will any negative feelings we have prevent us and our children and our children’s children from seeing the next one, and the one after that, and the one after that—and on and on…

La La Land should have been a disaster. Every American movie musical it resembles has been. The plot of La La Land recalls Martin Scorsese's tiresome New York, New York, released in 1977; both feature a principled and snobbish jazz musician who falls in love with an overeager novice performer. Its…

La La Land should have been a disaster. Every American movie musical it resembles has been. The plot of La La Land recalls Martin Scorsese's tiresome New York, New York, released in 1977; both feature a principled and snobbish jazz musician who falls in love with an overeager novice performer. Its…

In the great and overlooked 1991 comedy Soapdish, a television executive muses on the work of his network's greatest soap opera star. "She is and will always be the Queen of Misery," he says. Well, Celeste of Soapdish has nothing on Casey Affleck of the year's most highly-praised film, Manchester…

In the great and overlooked 1991 comedy Soapdish, a television executive muses on the work of his network’s greatest soap opera star. "She is and will always be the Queen of Misery," he says. Well, Celeste of Soapdish has nothing on Casey Affleck of the year's most highly-praised film, Manchester…

It's hard to make a bad Howard Hughes movie, but Warren Beatty has pulled it off with Rules Don't Apply, the first movie he's directed in 18 years and the first movie in which he's acted in 15. He is being treated kindly by the press for this calamity of a motion picture, for which there is no…

It’s hard to make a bad Howard Hughes movie, but Warren Beatty has pulled it off with Rules Don't Apply, the first movie he's directed in 18 years and the first movie in which he's acted in 15. He is being treated kindly by the press for this calamity of a motion picture, for which there is no…

Arrival is one of those movies that works very hard (and very cleverly) to convince you it's one thing until it takes an astounding turn in its last third and you realize you've been seeing a story about something else entirely—precisely at the point when it suddenly deepens, enriches itself, and…

Arrival is one of those movies that works very hard (and very cleverly) to convince you it’s one thing until it takes an astounding turn in its last third and you realize you've been seeing a story about something else entirely—precisely at the point when it suddenly deepens, enriches itself, and…

There’s something reassuring, even comforting, about competence—not genius, but rather the elusive combination of craftsmanship and care that can sometimes be more welcome than the unexpected. Competence is why Marvel Studios, which has been making superhero movies since 2008, has become the most…

Imagine for a moment that Arnold Schwarzenegger's agent received a script called The Accountant in 1992 because its producer and director hoped against hope he would star in it. In this film, Schwarzenegger would play an emotionless genius who cooks the books for evil governments and crime…

Imagine for a moment that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s agent received a script called The Accountant in 1992 because its producer and director hoped against hope he would star in it. In this film, Schwarzenegger would play an emotionless genius who cooks the books for evil governments and crime…

There was a recurring sketch on the late, great, still-underrated comedy show SCTV in which two farmers in overalls, Big Jim McBob and Billy Sol Hurok, reviewed obscure foreign films and highbrow fare with one common feature: They showed people and things exploding. "I'll tell you one film I really…

There was a recurring sketch on the late, great, still-underrated comedy show SCTV in which two farmers in overalls, Big Jim McBob and Billy Sol Hurok, reviewed obscure foreign films and highbrow fare with one common feature: They showed people and things exploding. “I'll tell you one film I really…

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children is the name of a children's book published a decade ago, heavily influenced by the Harry Potter series. My oldest daughter read it when she was 9, along with its sequels; she liked it, didn't love it, never really talked about it. She's now 12, and last…

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is the name of a children's book published a decade ago, heavily influenced by the Harry Potter series. My oldest daughter read it when she was 9, along with its sequels; she liked it, didn't love it, never really talked about it. She's now 12, and last…

I watched Blood Father—a tough, smart, violent little movie available on demand—on my iPad this past weekend. It works as a companion piece to Hell or High Water, the riveting bank-robber flick that many people think is the movie of the year so far, only instead of being set in hardscrabble Texas,…

I watched Blood Father—a tough, smart, violent little movie available on demand—on my iPad this past weekend. It works as a companion piece to Hell or High Water, the riveting bank-robber flick that many people think is the movie of the year so far, only instead of being set in hardscrabble Texas,…

Clint Eastwood's movie about Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, the pilot who landed his plane on the Hudson River in January 2009 and saved all 155 aboard, is the damnedest thing. You know what's going to happen before you go into the theater. Even worse, it's only a few minutes in when you get that…

Clint Eastwood’s movie about Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, the pilot who landed his plane on the Hudson River in January 2009 and saved all 155 aboard, is the damnedest thing. You know what's going to happen before you go into the theater. Even worse, it's only a few minutes in when you get that…

Fifty years ago, on September 8, 1966, Star Trek premiered on NBC. It struggled through 79 meh-rated episodes before it was cancelled. No one knew it would prove to be the most influential piece of American popular culture of the past half-century.

The death of Gene Wilder last week at 83 has led to the publication of many fond encomia to a performer who had ceased being of much interest 40 years ago, precisely at the moment when he became a movie star. It was the release of a romantic chase comedy called Silver Streak in 1976 that made…

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

The death of Gene Wilder last week at 83 has led to the publication of many fond encomia to a performer who had ceased being of much interest 40 years ago, precisely at the moment when he became a movie star. It was the release of a romantic chase comedy called Silver Streak in 1976 that made…

There’s a new bank-robber movie that's good enough to survive what may be the worst title in recent memory: Hell or High Water, a name that evokes precisely nothing about the picture even though it refers to a throwaway line spoken in its third act. At least, back in the day, when Hollywood came up…

The nifty suspense thriller Nerve captures lightning in a bottle as it tells a cautionary tale about the role of social media in the lives of America’s teenagers. And though it was made to appeal to teenagers, I think Nerve will have the greatest emotional resonance with the parents of teens and…

Fifty years ago, on September 8, 1966, Star Trek premiered on NBC. It struggled through 79 meh-rated episodes before it was cancelled. No one knew it would prove to be the most influential piece of American popular culture of the past half-century.

Central Intelligence, the only nonanimated and nongenre hit of the summer, is far from the worst movie I’ve ever seen. Among other things, it has a startlingly effective low-key performance by Kevin Hart, who for the first time in his film career doesn't spend two hours chomping on the scenery and…

A  chamber comedy set among New York City academics, Maggie's Plan is so slight on the surface and so seemingly unambitious that its remarkable qualities sneak up on you. The "plan" of the title only begins to emerge after the first hour—and it is part of the considerable achievement of the…

The last time America felt this bad about itself was the 1970s, and perhaps the only enduringly positive result of that time was how that rotten mood led to some genuinely great moviemaking. One could say the same today about television, and indeed the dark, anxious, impending-doom-like spirit of…

Whit Stillman’s peerless comedies of the 1990s—Metropolitan, Barcelona, The Last Days of Disco—feature Americans who are living in their time but are not really of their time. They are all young people, but they are not interested in the things young people were interested in when the movies were…

People love Captain America: Civil War, the latest Marvel comic-book movie. I mean, they love it. Say a word against it and their eyes narrow; by doing so, you have revealed to them your hatred of fun, and for this you must die. Well, maybe not die. Rather, they are sure you exist in a living death…

Sing Street is laden with melodramatic elements: a marriage disintegrating against the background of a national economic crisis, a vicious priest who beats up a boy, a wayward teenage girl with an institutionalized mother and a sexually abusive father, even a reckless emigration on a leaky…

One More Time, a small-scale drama set in the Hamptons now playing on demand in your living room, is a beautiful mess. The infectiously watchable Christopher Walken plays a 70-year-old singing star named Paul Lombard desperate to stage a comeback. A spectacular Amber Heard plays his 31-year-old…

How often can you say you’ve seen a movie that takes on a key moral and philosophical issue raised by the war on terror and does right by it? Maybe Zero Dark Thirty—although that initially garlanded and subsequently defamed picture, which does not kowtow to the screechy assurances of the…

Twenty years ago, in Dazed and Confused, the largely unknown writer-director Richard Linklater offered up an indelible portrait of America in the 1970s in the guise of a conventional R-rated teen movie. Now, in 2016, the garlanded Linklater has brought us a conventional R-rated teen movie in the…

In Batman v. Superman, the Caped Crusader and the Man of Steel try to kill each other. In the sequel, they should team up and kill the people who made Batman v. Superman. Its filmmakers and the executives who hired them run the gamut from the unspeakably cynical to the astoundingly pretentious…

‘It is well that war is so terrible," Robert E. Lee once said, "or we should grow too fond of it." The quote makes almost no sense to us today, after a century of battlefield horrors and the awareness of the psychic and spiritual costs of war on those who fight it. But for soldiers in the premodern…

I would like to report that, as a committed contrarian, I was less impressed by the theatrical sensation called Hamilton than everybody else has been. Alas, I can't. Hamilton, which I only saw this past week even though it opened over the summer, is everything you've heard—and if you haven't heard…

The stunning success of the giggly, extremely violent, and incredibly foul-mouthed comic book movie Deadpool—it earned $152 million in a single weekend when its studio expected half that—is nothing less than a pivot point in the history of popular culture. It marks the moment when the Hollywood…

There are jokes, there are inside jokes, and then there is the new movie from the brothers Joel and Ethan Coen, who are without question the most impressive and interesting American filmmakers of our time.

There’s a great joke about acting. One actor says to another actor, Hey, I just got cast in Hamlet. The other actor says, I know this is embarrassing, but I've never read or seen it. What's it about? The first one says, It's about this guy, Gravedigger #2 .  .  .

My friend the movie producer is a major fan of Mad Max: Fury Road. He says it’s the best film he thinks he's seen in five years. This is interesting, because it's not the kind of movie he makes; he produces "indies," meaning films with relatively modest budgets that center on character rather than…

The Revenant is beautifully photographed. Really. It’s beautiful. I mean, you've never seen such beauty. We're talking nature here, people. Rivers. Mountains. Snow. Even an avalanche. Some fog, both early morning and late afternoon. Also, it's supposed to be set in 1823, so the idea is we're seeing…

Two years ago, the writer-director Quentin Tarantino announced his next picture would be a Western called The Hateful Eight. He sent his script to a few people, and it was leaked. Tarantino announced that he would not be making The Hateful Eight after all because he was so furious. Then he reversed…

There’s no upside for me in reviewing Star Wars: The Force Awakens. If I say anything interesting about its plot, I'll be criticized for publishing spoilers. If I say anything critical, I'll be accused of raining on everybody's parade. If I praise it, I'll be attacked for excessive kindness and…

There is a video on the World Wrestling Entertainment's website called "Donald Trump's Greatest WWE Moments," which invites you to "Watch Donald Trump put his money where his mouth is in some of his most memorable WWE appearances." The video lasts for three minutes. In it, you can watch Trump slam…

Ryan Coogler, who conceived and directed the new hit film Creed, is up to something very tricky with this effort to update the Rocky films to the 21st century. Creed is not a Cinderella story about a working-class chump who gets an unexpected shot at glory, as the original Rocky was. Instead, it's…

Colm Tóibín did something interesting and unusual when he wrote his novel Brooklyn, which was published in 2009. He chose to tell an immigration story about an Irish girl just out of her teens who has no particular desire to go to America, no particular drive once she arrives in America, and no…

I went to see Spotlight out of a sense of dreary duty. The movie is being touted as an Oscar possibility and has received rapturous reviews, neither of which is any guarantee of quality or enjoyment. Quite the opposite, in fact: Last year’s Oscar winner, Birdman, was similarly praised; I found it…

You readers flatter me. You send me emails and letters asking me to review certain movies you’ve seen because you want to know what I have to say about them. At times these missives make me feel guilty, because I know I’m going to let you down. Because it’s often the case that you want to hear my…

Five years ago in these pages, I called The Social Network  “a two-hour exploration of a single question: Is Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, an assh—?” Now Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriter of The Social Network, has just written a movie called Steve Jobs. It is a two-hour exploration of a…

When was the last time a movie was just, you know, lovable? Guardians of the Galaxy, maybe—all the more so because its lovability was so unexpected, coming as it did from the Marvel comic book movie factory. The same is true of The Martian, a movie so spectacularly winsome it’s almost beyond…

If you are a person of a certain age—by which I mean a person who receives unsolicited mailings from AARP—and you don’t mind old-fashioned dirty talk, you will likely find yourself utterly entranced by a wonderful new documentary called Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead. That’s especially true if you…

Black Mass is the latest cinematic portrayal of the life and career of James “Whitey” Bulger, the gangster who ran roughshod over Boston for nearly 20 years with the odd assistance of an F B I agent whose secret informant he was. Nine years ago, Martin Scorsese’s The Departed merged the plotline of…

Meryl Streep is so extraordinary she can do anything​—​anything, that is, except play an ordinary person. She’s only tried to do so twice in her 35-year career as a leading lady, and in both cases she was called upon to embody an unsatisfied suburban wife, first in 1984’s Falling in Love and almost…

Just as Philip Larkin sighed that the sexual revolution “came too late for me,” I had already aged out of rap as it emerged with enormous force in the 1980s. I was then in my twenties and, listening to it, I felt for the first time the same sort of generational disdain that adults of the 1950s had…

The Gift​—​a compact picture written and directed by the Australian actor Joel Edgerton​—​is the best American thriller in 20 years or more. On its own limited terms, The Gift is an almost perfect piece of work; in an extraordinarily controlled debut behind the camera, Edgerton doesn’t make a false…

Right now, in New York, the big news is the Broadway opening of a musical biography of Alexander Hamilton told in hip-hop. Such a deliberately anachronistic retelling of American history is automatic grounds for deep skepticism. And yet the chorus of raves for Hamilton—which extend from Barack…

Mission: Impossible–Rogue Nation makes no sense. Even more striking, this fifth installment in the Tom Cruise movie series based on the 1960s television show doesn’t even try to make sense. 

With Trainwreck, the comedy impresario Judd Apatow has once again made a movie about an irresponsible adult-child who is compelled to grow up by the end of the film. This was the plotline of both The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, the two box-office sensations that made Apatow’s career, and it…

Every now and then, on Twitter or Facebook, I find myself referring to something I really enjoyed as “genius” or “a work of genius” or “pure genius.” Why do I do this? After all, I don’t actually think Richard Benjamin’s performance as an unhinged Jewish Van Helsing in the 1979 Dracula parody Love…

The new Pixar film about an 11-year-old girl’s moment of crisis and change is called Inside Out, and it’s a perfect title—maybe too perfect for its own good. Everything the movie shows going on inside Riley’s head is glorious. And that’s most of what we see, so Inside Out deserves to be called the…

Jurassic World is a movie about itself. It tells a story about the difficulty of making special effects exciting when it seems like audiences have already seen it all. In the movie, the titular theme park has been built on the same island that hosted the old Jurassic Park back in the day when…

As a comic actress, Melissa McCarthy resembles a first-rate baseball pitcher—because, unlike many of her brethren, who have a singular shtick and stick with it, she has both a curve and a fastball. 

William Butler Yeats might have described an old person as a “paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick,” but then Yeats didn’t live to see the 72-year-old actress Blythe Danner bloom like a bird of paradise in the first starring role she’s had on screen in her 43-year career. I’ll See You in My…

One Friday evening in 1980, I journeyed to the far West Side of Chicago to a drive-in on Cicero Avenue and attended what may have been the strangest double feature in the history of the world. The top of the bill was The Gong Show Movie, a film written by, directed by, and starring Chuck Barris,…

Offering an opinion of Avengers: Age of Ultron is like reviewing Chex Mix. According to what stand-ard should one judge this mixture of breakfast cereal and pretzels and croutons and salt? Even if you find it bland or uninteresting you’ll probably have a few handfuls anyway. And if you love it, you…

There are several key shots in movies—the visual strategies directors and cinematographers and editors use to establish scene, mood, movement, and dramatic tension, guiding the viewer’s eye to important information. 

The writer-director Noah Baumbach has a gimlet satirical eye for the foibles and follies of the upper-middle class, which he deploys to brilliant and hilarious effect in his new movie, While We’re Young. A childless husband and wife in their 40s, played with beautiful understatement by Ben Stiller…

Run All Night is unquestionably the best of the seemingly endless series of thrillers Liam Neeson has made since 2008’s Taken made him a most unlikely action star at the age of 56. And yet, rather than being celebrated for rising above the others, Run All Night has been received so poorly by…

Fifty years ago, a wildly heated cultural battle broke out between two movie critics: a New Yorker named Andrew Sarris and a San Franciscan named Pauline Kael. Sarris was the chief American expositor of the “auteur theory,” which emerged from French film magazines in the 1950s and asserted that the…

Will anyone go to the movies 25 years from now? Will there even be movie theaters 25 years from now? These are not idle questions. New research from the Motion Picture Association of America shows how the moviegoing audience of those between the ages of 25 and 39 has contracted…

There should be movies like Focus every week. It’s a stylish and amusing film with glamorous actors, memorable supporting players, lush settings, and lots of twists and turns. Will Smith plays a successful con artist who chisels people all over the world. He’s amused when a two-bit newbie played by…

The question that haunted the American motion-picture industry in the two months leading up to the Academy Awards broadcast was this: Is Hollywood racist? In December, leaked emails revealed how one of  Hollywood’s longest-serving studio chiefs, Amy Pascal, and its most prestigious producer, Scott…

When I tell you that, in my opinion, the three novels now known as the Fifty Shades Trilogy are the worst books I have ever read all the way through, I am not telling you anything interesting. To criticize E. L. James’s publishing version of winning the Irish Sweepstakes is to attack a cultural…

When I tell you that, in my opinion, the three novels now known as the Fifty Shades Trilogy are the worst books I have ever read all the way through, I am not telling you anything interesting. To criticize E. L. James’s publishing version of winning the Irish Sweepstakes is to attack a cultural…

I don’t remember when I have been more deeply affected by a film than I was by The Last Five Years, a jewel box of a movie-musical that is unquestionably the best of its kind since Chicago was released in 2003. It is at once a tiny slip of a thing and an emotional blockbuster. Over the course of a…

The director of the new Russian movie Leviathan now lives in Canada. This was a wise decision on Andrey Zvyagintsev’s part—because even though Leviathan received grants from the Russian government and was officially selected to represent the country in this year’s Oscar race, at some point in the…

The overwhelming American Sniper is cast in shadow from start to finish by two real-world tragedies, one very broad and one very precise. The first is the irresolution of the Iraq war, the conflict to which the film’s titular character—Navy SEAL Christopher Kyle—was deployed four times. The second…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with contributing editor John Podhoretz on his review of American Sniper.

The Imitation Game is the fanciest ABC Afterschool Special ever made: It takes the inspiring, mystifying, and upsetting life story of a great genius and turns it into a didactic and banal lesson about how people who are “different” are also very, very special.

The marketing genius of movies like Selma, the highly praised docudrama about the march in Alabama that triggered the 1965 Voting Rights Act, is that they simultaneously confuse and intimidate critics and audiences by making them feel as though it would be an act of disrespect to speak anything but…

Who is the best young actress in the movies? The obvious answer is Jennifer Lawrence, all of 24 and with a deserved Oscar to her credit for Silver Linings Playbook and a second she should have won for her supporting role in American Hustle. (She’s also the most popular, with her third Hunger Games…

Raise your hand if you want to see Moses portrayed as an insurgent lunatic terrorist with a bad conscience, the pharaoh who sought the murder of all first-born Hebrew slaves as a nice and reasonable fellow, and God as a foul-tempered 11-year-old boy with an English accent.

This book is something of a Rube Goldberg machine. Its author, Time theater critic Richard Zoglin, makes enormous claims about the cultural importance of his subject: He calls Bob Hope “the entertainer of the century,” the first person to be a star in every medium, the man seen by more people in…

You want to like Interstellar. Why wouldn’t you? It’s a big, juicy, fancy, ambitious, emotional epic about the future of humankind. It has a killer lead performance by Matthew McConaughey. And for conservatives, the movie is full of surprising “Easter eggs” suggesting (as the blockbuster Batman…

The HBO miniseries Olive Kitteridge, featuring the Oscar-winning actress Frances McDormand delivering what may be one of the greatest performances ever recorded, is nothing short of a masterpiece. We have come to expect work at this level from HBO, but it’s still interesting to contemplate the…

If you go see the universally praised Birdman, the story of an over-the-hill film star trying to make a comeback by starring in a Broadway play, I hope you enjoy yourself. I really do. That’s what movies are for—to provide enjoyment, a few hours of diversion. Genuine art transcends that shallow…

In the universe according to Gone Girl, men are no great shakes: They’re inconstant and weak and foolish. But women .  .  . ah, women. They’re smart, resourceful, infinitely clever—and profoundly dangerous. It’s lucky for the financiers of this sizzling domestic melodrama on the model of Fatal…

In Whiplash, a dislikable teenager runs afoul of a dislikable adult, and what emerges from their conflict is the movie of the year so far. It’s rare for an American film to offer such an unvarnished portrait of unattractive people, and rightly so: Why would people want to watch? Well, the…

Right now at your local multiplex, Denzel Washington is appearing in The Equalizer, a lousy picture in which he is required to display almost supernatural killing skills—and he is entirely believable even though the movie is not, even for one second. You might say he’s playing Liam Neeson, or at…

For years, people have been telling me to read Jonathan Tropper’s This Is Where I Leave You (2009), a comic novel about a dysfunctional Westchester family whose secrets and lies and disappointments all come out during a week in which its members gather to mourn the passing of the patriarch.

There’s nothing quite so pointless as a movie about gloomy and depressed criminals. Why watch two hours about life on the other side of the law if there’s no kick to it? Crime movies are fun because they acknowledge the pleasures of transgression even as they show the wages of sin. So crooks on…

The summer of 2014 confirms it: Hollywood is dying. By “Hollywood,” I mean the industry that produces mainstream, conventional movies that are made and distributed by big studios. This summer was a great disappointment for the business, with total ticket sales down 15 percent from the year before:…

If you know that Boyhood has been rapturously received as a revolutionary work in the annals of American filmmaking, it is almost sure to disappoint you. I know this, because I saw it two weeks after it opened and it disappointed me, even though I knew I was seeing something no other filmmaker had…

The age of the male movie star has passed. Welcome to the age of the female movie star. 

I don’t know what it says about the movies these days that the best one I’ve seen so far this summer is a completely insane thriller set on a train in perpetual motion around a post-apocalyptic earth on which the have-nots are packed like sardines in the caboose while the wealthy live in splendor…

If you really want to know what a bunch of simians—whose IQs have been boosted by drugs to the human level (or higher, maybe even to the Kardashian level)—would do with themselves if that same drug wiped out all of humanity, then you really have to see Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. It’s quite an…

Something interesting happened a year ago: The movie theater a few blocks from my house was radically redesigned. This came as a surprise, for the AMC 84th Street wasn’t failing in any way. Indeed, from its opening in 1985 to the present day, it has been one of the most successful theaters in…

The key to understanding the publishing sensation called The Fault in Our Stars—John Green’s young-adult novel that has dominated bestseller lists for more than two years and has already sold more than nine million copies worldwide—is first to imagine Holden Caulfield in the 21st century. Then…

Movie stars go cold. It’s part of the way popular culture works. For a long time, people just love watching them. People can’t get enough of them. And then, after they go to the well once too often with a formula that has gone flat, or after their messy personal lives get all mixed up in the…

The much-maligned new comedy A Million Ways to Die in the West is actually pretty funny in spots. But it’s very strange. It’s an affectionate western homage, a mash-up western, a western pastiche. That’s not odd. What’s odd is that it’s an homage to a parody, and paying tribute to a spoof is just…

Is a single standout scene in a movie worth a half-billion dollars? That is the question to be answered by the worldwide gross of this seventh film in a series that began back in 2000. 

Why does it feel like a modest triumph that the new version of Godzilla is actually not bad? This is really the best thing to say about Godzilla—if said in a surprised, huh, who’da thunk it? kind of way: Hey, not bad! It’s an achievement of a kind when a film about a rubber-suited character…

The new movie Chef is about a hotshot cook who loses his way and then finds himself anew selling Cuban sandwiches off a truck. The food-cart-as-spiritual-salvation trope became a pop-culture cliché a couple years ago: Jason Segel did exactly the same thing with tacos in The Five-Year Engagement,…

Adultery comedies usually follow a pat formula: A perfectly sensible married person is being cheated on. Revenge is plotted, and the punishment usually involves taking advantage of the fact that the person with whom the spouse is cheating is either a gorgeous bimbo or a brainless hunk. The Other…

In 1962, Arthur C. Clarke famously observed that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This observation is both brilliantly true and wildly overblown: After all, for many of us, even the most basic technologies, even those hundreds of years old, are still nearly…

There’s a new movie called Draft Day you’re almost certainly not going to see in a theater if you didn’t go see it during its first weekend—and because you didn’t, it won’t be around much longer. Twenty-five years ago, Draft Day might have been a hit. Its headline performer, Kevin Costner, was the…

Aficionados often refer to comic books in terms of eras: the Golden Age, the Silver Age, the Bronze Age. The same may now be true of the comic-book movie. Judging from last year’s mega-hit Iron Man 3, and the brand-new mega-hit Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the comic-book movie has entered…

First and foremost,Noah is a movie, and the first question about a movie is whether it is good or badas a movie. That turns out to be a difficult one to answer.

The Grand Budapest Hotel, the latest offering from the writer and director Wes Anderson, is a laborious confection, rather like one of the Mitteleuropa cakes made by one of its characters. It is elaborate and beautiful. It is sweet. It is a work of true artistry. But it is also heavy, and slightly…

It is almost unimaginable: five men past the age of 35 (one nearing 50), among the most successful and garlanded professionals in their field and at the height of their earning powers, leaving their jobs and their families to produce government propaganda. The experience was frustrating and often…

What does a poor or lower-middle-class white person, especially one from the South or Southwest, have to do to get a break from fancy high-end TV producers? It is a remarkable fact about this new Golden Age of television, which began with The Sopranos in 1999, that its primary focus of attention is…

The Monuments Men is a profoundly well-intentioned movie that seeks to pay deserved tribute to a subject both moving and dramatic: the effort by the Allies to protect the cultural patrimony of the West during World War II. But just as the road to hell is paved with good intentions, so, too, it…

Never before in history have liberal clichés about the evils and the rapacity of capitalism been combined so ironically as they are in The Lego Movie, a gargantuan triumph at the box office in its first weekend. This fast, flashy, colorful, and intermittently hilarious movie—from the…

Successful entertainers are often awful people. If you put fame, wealth, and narcissism in a blender, the resulting brew can be toxic. Fame causes ordinary folk to worship the entertainer and to view him as a superior being to be served. Wealth provides the means and the opportunity for indulgence.…

The year is 1961. 

The Wolf of Wall Street is three hours long, and you feel every minute of it. It’s not that it’s tedious; this filthy and foul-mouthed portrayal of young and crazy drug-addled securities crooks is far too garish and overheated to be boring. Instead, Martin Scorsese’s latest portrait of American…

This propulsive and overstuffed movie tries to do far too much. It has more plot than it knows what to do with, and for a while near the end it becomes almost impossible to follow. American Hustle is a partly fictionalized account of the headshaking Abscam scandal, in which six members of Congress…

Earlier this year, Cathleen Schine published a novel called Fin & Lady, a deliriously nostalgic look at an orphaned boy who comes to live with his wealthy sister in a half-renovated Greenwich Village townhouse. The time is the 1960s, and the whole cast of characters is present: the wise…

There’s a breathtaking and deeply frustrating Italian film called The Great Beauty I have to tell you about, because it’s really something to see even though it will probably drive you a little crazy.

The problem with 12 Years a Slave is that it is very, very good—and because it is very, very good, it is extraordinarily difficult to watch. So much so, in fact, that I assumed the movie was a more graphic version of the 1853 memoir of the same name by Solomon Northup, a free black man who, in…

How do you make a movie about depressing people that is not, in itself, depressing? That is the challenge that writer-director Alexander Payne sets for himself: He is the Houdini of depression, shackling himself in a narrative straitjacket of hopeless despair and then somehow magically getting…

There is only one person on screen. We hear him in a brief voiceover at the beginning of the movie, after which he speaks a total of 40 words during the 106-minute running time. What we do is watch this man as he copes with a disaster at sea. The movie is called All Is Lost, and it’s nothing short…

Thank God the baby boomers are long-lived, because without them, there’d be almost nothing worth seeing at the movies. Boomers may bankrupt the country with their retirements and suck their kids and grandkids dry with their Medicare Part D, but they remain a large cohort of moviegoers and they…

Cormac McCarthy’s script for The Counselor offers a new twist on the immortal George Orwell crack that some ideas are so stupid only an intellectual would believe them. Only a truly gifted writer could have written something quite as awful as this jaw-dropping fiasco, simultaneously so overwrought…

I saw Gravity several weeks ago, so it’s interesting to reflect on what kind of staying power this box office sensation actually has. Once you’re out of the theater and away from director Alfonso Cuarón’s mind-boggling success in convincing you that you’re actually watching astronauts struggling to…