Parked underneath an overpass, a hit man looks out the window, surveying a bleak American landscape. The nation is, in a word, screwed. “There’s a plague coming,” Jackie (Brad Pitt) declares early on in “Killing Them Softly.” It’s 2008, and on radios and televisions, a young senator from Illinois is promising a new era of … Read more
‘Broken Rage’ Stream it on Amazon Prime Video. The director Takeshi Kitano’s “Broken Rage” might be the most original action film I’ve ever seen. A witty parody of the genre, it follows an older Japanese hit man named Mouse (Kitano), who’s forced by detectives to inform on a gangster by becoming the goon’s bodyguard. Mouse … Read more
When Wes Anderson was just starting out and wanted to reshoot some scenes for his 1996 debut “Bottle Rocket,” the rookie director got a shock. Columbia Pictures had sent all the movie’s props off to a store, which had then sold them for next to nothing. So when he made his next movie, “Rushmore” (1998), … Read more
Contains spoilers about past episodes but not the Season 2 finale. In “Severance,” the Apple TV+ series about a shadowy company where some employees have their consciousness split into two parts, with the “innie” doing all the work and the “outie” remembering none of it, the office is sparse and lifeless. The show reinforces that … Read more
A Dopey movie makes us grumpy. ‘Snow White’ Directed by Marc Webb, this fairy-tale reimagining sees Snow White (Rachel Zegler) rescuing the seven dwarfs as they rebel against the Evil Queen (Gal Gadot). From our review: In an essay pegged to Disney’s unhappy 2019 live-action version of “Aladdin,” the critic Aisha Harris wrote in The … Read more
Robert E. Ginna Jr., a founding editor of People magazine, a book editor and a film producer whose 1952 Life magazine article provoked a frenzy by validating the idea that flying saucers might exist and could have visited Earth from outer space, died on March 4 at his home in Sag Harbor, N.Y. His death … Read more
‘The Assessment’ Review: Meticulously Planned Parenthood
“The Alto Knights,” a new mob movie starring Robert De Niro, carries a lot of weight from its very beginning. Not just historical weight about the Mafia — it concentrates on a stretch from the mid-1950s into the early 1970s — but cinematic weight as well. It’s the story of a gangster friendship that turns … Read more
There are two Bob Trevinos in “Bob Trevino Likes It.” One of them makes Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s character in “Hard Truths” look like parent of the year. The other starts out as a stranger, and grows into found family. The movie, written and directed by Tracie Laymon and based on her own experiences, centers on Lily … Read more
When we first meet Eddie (Bill Skarsgard), a recently divorced father, he’s begging a mechanic to give him a few more days to pay the bill. No catch. And no car. Desperate, Eddie, breaks into a snazzy sport utility vehicle hoping to pawn whatever valuables he finds. It’s here, inside the vehicle, that most of … Read more