"The Electrical Life Of Louis Wain" stars Benedict Cumberbatch as the Victorian-era illustrator who celebrated cats and believed he could feel electricity in the space around him. Claire Foy is Emily Richardson, the woman he loves, and the two stars in conjunction are a grand spectacle.

Film Reviews

What's That Shimmering In the Ether?

A filmmaking couple in Mia Hansen-Løve's wonderful "Bergman Island" spend a summer residency on the island off the coast of Sweden where Ingmar Bergman lived and made some of his most cherished films.

Mixing It Up With the Master

It's not your ordinary lamb, but then "Lamb" isn't your ordinary Icelandic indie film. It's a debut feature, by Valdimar Jóhannsson, that's extraordinarily well made, seriously strange and stars the superb Noomi Rapace, who was the fierce Goth hacker Lisbeth Salandar in the original Swedish version of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo." 

A Blessed Event On the Sheep Farm

It's been 15 years since we first saw him, and were startled by him, as James Bond in "Casino Royale" (which turned out to be one of the best Bonds ever.) Now Daniel Craig is playing Bond for the last time in "No Time To Die," which is very long, very uneven and, from time to time, greatly affecting.

The End Of a Bond Line

What if the man who says "I'm Your Man" isn't a man? Maria Schrader's German-language sci-fi romance explores the shifting ground between hormones and silicon.

The Algorithms of Love

The 48th annual Telluride Film Festival took place actually, rather than virtually, at its accustomed site almost 10,000 feet up in the Colorado Rockies. Last year the festival went dark during the pandemic. This year it was an exuberant reminder, as always, that the movie medium is alive and, against heavy odds, well.

Rocky Mountain movie high

In the movie world the word "sequel" is usually a synonym for letdown. Not so with the new "Candyman," which calls itself a "spiritual sequel" to the 1992 slasher classic. The director, Nia DaCosta, and her colleagues--she wrote the screenplay with Jordan Peele and Win Rosenfeld--have transformed the material by rethinking what it said about race in America in the first place.

An urban legend about an urban legend

"Reminiscence," a futurist debut feature by Lisa Joy, the co-creator of "Westworld," may be best remembered for its stunning images of Miami at a time of catastrophic climate change, when rising sea levels have engulfed much of the city. The immensely complicated plot, on the other hand, is mostly mind-numbing.

Lost In the Labyrinth of Memory

Matt Damon is an Oklahoma oil-patch worker who travels to France to help his daughter, imprisoned in Marseille for a murder she claims she didn't commit. The film is a fictional reworking of the case of Amanda Knox, an American woman acquitted in 2015 of the charge of having killed her flatmate. The director and co-writer was Tom McCarthy, who did the investigative procedural "Spotlight."

A Rougneck In the Rough

Vacationers in a tropical resort age mysteriously in "Old," an inexplicably silly horror/slasher/sci-fi feature by M. Night Shyamalan.

Quick, Someone Call a Geriatrician!

"Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain" captures the sweep of the chef-turned-TV-celebrity's life in captivating detail. It also struggles with the mystery of why, at what seemed to be the peak of his career, Bourdain committed suicide three years ago in his room in a French hotel.

Bright Life, Dark Mystery

Value "Black Widow," the latest addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, for what it is (a surprisingly intimate portrait of two sisters and their strange family, plus several elegant action sequences) rather than discounting it for what it isn't (another of Marvel's adventures in which cosmic forces are at work.)

Sister Act

The action master, who last directed an episode of "Fast and Furious" in 2013, is back with "F9: The Fast Saga," an action spectacular in which cars not only fly--that's so old-school--but go into orbit.

Justin Lin's Flying Circus

Retired? Not on your life, or hers. This indefatigable entertainment icon has recently finished a role in Steven Spielberg's new screen version of "West Side Story" (she won an Oscar for her work in the 1961 version.) Now she's the subject of a new documentary in which she looks back on her life, and forward to whatever the next gig may be.

Rita Moreno at 89

Before Lin-Manuel Miranda brought his astonishing "Hamilton" to Broadway he created "In the Heights," a Broadway musical set in a Latino, mostly Dominican neighborhood of Washington Heights, in Upper Manhattan near the George Washington Bridge. Thirteen years after its opening, the show has finally made it to the screen in a production that's just what is needed to bring movie audiences back into the fold.

The Heights of "The Heights"

The Pulitzer Prize-winning critic of The Wall Street Journal, Joe Morgenstern reviews films weekly in the paper and on KCRW.

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Film Reviews

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