DESTROYER (Annapurna – Dec. 25):  Another fractured-time thriller, this one trickier than most, because the script by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi features a sort of time-loop within a loop.  All that structural fanciness aside, Destroyer is mostly a vehicle for Nicole Kidman’s aggressively deglamorized performance as an end-of-the-line LAPD detective named Erin Bell.  […]

  22 JULY (Netflix – October 10):  So many terrible things have happened in the world since July 22, 2011 that at least in the US, few even remember the horrific events that occurred in Oslo, Norway that day, when a single right-wing fanatic named Andres Behring Breivik gunned down 69 people, most of them […]

  ROMA (Netflix – Dec. 14):  Alfonso Cuaron is one of the master filmmakers of this era, and Roma confirms that all over again.  It’s a deceptively simple memory piece, a semi-autobiographical story set in the Mexico City of his youth in 1970-71, with most of the action revolving around an upper-middle-class family with three […]

  A STAR IS BORN (Warners – October 5):  Bradley Cooper, making his directing debut, decided to do the equivalent of a first-time weightlifter starting out with a 400-pound barbell.  It isn’t just that A Star Is Born is one of the most iconic Hollywood classics (this is the fifth version, counting What Price Hollywood?, […]

  IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK (Annapurna – November 30):  Barry Jenkins’ follow-up to Moonlight received a rapturous standing ovation at its Toronto premiere, and it’s unquestionably a beautiful piece of filmmaking,  Jenkins reunited with most of his Moonlight creative team, including cinematographer James Laxton and composer Nicholas Britell, and with a higher budget at […]

  THE HATE U GIVE (20th – October 19):  YA radicalization.  George Tillman Jr’s film, from a sprawling script by Audrey Wells (based on the novel by Angie Thomas) centers on Starr (Amandla Stenberg), an African-American teen who witnesses her friend shot to death by a white cop.  But the story also wants to encompass […]

  WIDOWS (20th – Nov. 16):  Widows is a genre movie that isn’t sure it wants to be one.  That’s not a shock, because the idea of the aesthete director Steve McQueen, of Hunger, Shame and 12 Years A Slave renown, toiling in the land of Ocean’s 8 seemed odd from the start.  And for […]

  BEAUTIFUL BOY (Amazon/October 12):  A true-life story of drug addiction told with sincerity and superb acting, but which can’t shake the feel of generic problem drama.  Felix Van Groeningen’s film (co-written with Luke Davies) is based on parallel memoirs by recovering addict Nic Sheff (played most of the time by It Boy Timothee Chalomet) […]