‘Death of a Unicorn’ On the drive to his boss’s mansion, Elliot (Paul Rudd) hits and nearly kills a unicorn, leading to madcap misadventures in this horror-comedy directed by Alex Scharfman. From our review: There’s no real spoiling “Death of a Unicorn,” an unabashedly nonsensical movie that doesn’t take anything too seriously, itself included. There … Read more
Andy Kaufman became one of the most influential comedians ever in a brief amount of time — really only a decade, from his first national television appearance to his death from lung cancer in 1984 at 35. In between, his comic stunts blurred the lines of reality and fiction and found a variety of ways … Read more
It was a minute that changed the course of the “Star Wars” franchise. In “The Empire Strikes Back,” the now-celebrated 1980 sequel, audiences were treated to the first on-camera sighting of Emperor Palpatine. After receiving only a glancing mention in the first movie, he could have looked and sounded like anything. A human. A Wookiee. … Read more
Animated movies, like those from the famed Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, are not made in a hurry. The intricate hand drawings and attention paid to every single detail can make for a slow, potentially yearslong process. Or, you could simply ask ChatGPT to turn any old photo into a facsimile of Mr. Miyazaki’s work in … Read more
The Sundance Film Festival is venturing to a new ski town. After a year of deliberations, copious site visits and scores of plane rides, the board of the Sundance Institute has chosen Boulder, Colo., to host its film festival beginning January 2027. “Boulder is a tech town, a college town, it’s a really creative town,” … Read more
Hollywood has yet to recover the jobs in film and television production that were lost when strikes by writers and actors brought production to a halt in 2023 as the industry was shifting, according to a report released Thursday. The report by the Otis College of Art and Design found that jobs in the entertainment … Read more
“Holland” is set circa 2000 in Holland, Mich., a real town founded by Dutch settlers and distinguished by its windmill, tulips and other tributes to the Netherlands. Red herring is also on the menu in this second feature from the director Mimi Cave. The film’s unusual backdrop, unresolved subplots and dream-sequence fakeouts are ultimately all … Read more
In “Grand Tour,” a lush, melancholy story of yearning, a man treks across Asia in flight from his fiancée. But this one-sentence plotline barely scratches the surface of the Portuguese director Miguel Gomes’s magnificent black-and-white film, which mixes mannered studio footage with fluid documentary images to build a world that doesn’t abide by traditional rules … Read more
A movie aspiring to be a droll animal-led comedy and an examination of a dictatorship has an intimidating number of needles to thread. The director of “The Penguin Lessons,” Peter Cattaneo, also made “The Full Monty,” so he has some experience with crowd-pleasing films, at the same time being deft with unusual subject matter. The … Read more
“Julie Keeps Quiet” ignores the usual movie playbook on post-trauma drama with its unusually internal portrait of a teenage tennis player, Julie. After her ex-coach is suspended under murky circumstances, she prefers not to share details of his behavior. But her feelings in the aftermath run deep, and this Belgian film’s virtue lies in its … Read more