MISS AMERICANA (Netflix – January 31):  There are certainly areas of Taylor Swift’s life that are carefully elided in MISS AMERICANA (her actor boyfriend’s face and name are absent, for example, and there’s no mention of Cats), and Lana Wilson’s documentary culminates in an inspirational push that is very much on-message with Swift’s latest […]

  THE SURVIVOR (no distrib):  So many films and television productions have tackled the subject of the Holocaust over the decades that it takes real effort to break through with a story that feels fresh.  Barry Levinson’s The Survivor is his strongest film in years, and it manages to have an impact.  The script by […]

  RYE LANE (Searchlight/Disney – March 31):  Raine Allen Miller’s feature debut Rye Lane is a bubbly surprise, a quick-witted, fast-paced rom-com overflowing with charm.  The script by Nathan Bryon and Tom Melia wastes no time launching its premise, as Yas (Vivian Oparah) hears Dom (David Jonsson) weeping in a unisex toilet stall at a […]

  WILLIAM TELL (Goldwyn – 2025):  If it requires a certain amount of audacity to take a short children’s story and expand it into a violent adult action epic, that gall has to rise by several orders of magnitude when its 133 minutes conclude on a cliffhanger.  William Tell, the one about the dad who’s forced […]

> One of the enduring questions of Madonna’s illustrious quarter-century career is how someone so brilliant in managing every other facet of her persona has consistently made such terrible decisions when it comes to movies.  It’s the one medium where she’s never succeeded, and even when she’s occasionally done something right, she instantly follows it […]

  THE FIRST TIME may be too lovable for its own good.  Jonathan Kasdan’s teen romance, which premiered in the Dramatic Competition at Sundance, couldn’t be more straightforward:  in its opening minutes, it introduces the adorable Dave (Dylan O’Brien) and Aubrey (Britt Robertson), two hyper-articulate sweethearts who meet outside a suburban LA party neither of […]

  WRITERS is considered an “independent” movie because it was made without big-studio financing and because its stars (Greg Kinnear, Jennifer Connelly, Kristen Bell) are familiar faces, but not at the level that sell tickets strictly on the basis of their names.  Beyond those business considerations, though, Josh Boone’s debut feature is as safe and predictable […]

  TOUCHY FEELY offers the gifted writer/director Lynn Shelton taking herself very, very seriously for the most part.  It turns out to be a less effective mode for her than those of her recent small-scale comedies Humpday and Your Sister’s Sister, which had marvelously well-judged tones.  (In her more mainstream work, she recently directed a […]