Helen (Ellen Burstyn) has been on her own since her husband passed three years earlier. She’s relatively self-sustaining and as sharp as the proverbial tack, give or take a nasty habit of locking herself out of the house. It’s one thing to make a mistake in the morning, another to …

Glossified and Garbo-fied historical epic about the pants-wearing royal Swede of the 17th Century. (The lesbian interest is thoroughly neutered.) One unforgettable scene, more dance than drama, but more Dada than either, of Garbo "memorizing" a room. With John Gilbert, Lewis Stone, C. Aubrey Smith; directed by Rouben Mamoulian.

Catholics against Protestants in 16th-century France. Holocaustically against them in a gruesomely detailed re-enactment of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, the movie's too-early centerpiece. I.e., off-center centerpiece. The swollen-cheeked Isabelle Adjani, playing a woman half her age, and playing it through a veil of soft-focus photography, camps it up as …

Rather than a wedding, the departure point for this remake of Liliek Sudjio’s same-named 1981 Indonesian cult horror item is a reunion of sorts at an orphanage. Mr. Bandi (Yayu A.W. Unru), will any day now breathe his last, and a trio of acquiescent repatriates are coming to pay their …

Can women and women be friends? If you're gonna go hard to the closeup, you're gonna want to work with a face like Elisabeth Moss's. Alex Ross Perry's (Listen Up Philip) portrait of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown opens on a teary-smeary Moss mid-breakup, veering between …

An opera buffa (minus the singers) about Italians in London, a tale of elopement, espresso, and revenge. For all that England intrudes into the ethnic enclave, it could as well be about Italians anywhere, which may be the point. Any other point will be a matter of wildest conjecture. We …

It’s a movie about a poor girl (Madina Nalwanga) being raised in a ramshackle African village by a single mother (Lupita Nyong’o) who comes under the tutelage of a chess coach (David Oyelowo) who would rather be an engineer, and who quickly discovers she has a gift for the game. …

Connected through a shared love of Bollywood, a distant mother and daughter come of age in two different eras. Starring Amrit Kaur, Nimra Bucha, and Hamza Haq.

For a film featuring brutal dictators, the whitewashing of history, murder plots, revolutionary plots, labor camps, broken families, artistic bankruptcy, and rape, writer-director Fernando Trueba’s movie about movie-making is strangely frothy and upbeat. Is the point here that showbiz people can’t really afford personal principles, such that their acts of …

Michael Rymer's turgid and narration-heavy adaptation of Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles picks up the story of Lestat (sans Tom Cruise) after the bored bloodsucker awakens from a hundred-year hibernation to an exciting new sound in the world: rock-and-roll. The notion of a vampiric pop star -- all lipstick and …

Sitting on a shelf since 2015, this is Werner Herzog’s first narrative feature in six years. On paper, impassioned archaeologist Herzog and real-life subject Gertrude Bell (Nicole Kidman) — a writer, world-traveler, photographer, and all-around eloquent nomad whose heart belonged to the desert — would appear to have the makings …

Grinning, giddy Tanna Frederick continues her rise to buzzy stardom, at least in the world of Henry Jaglom’s L.A. vanity movies. After the opening logo (a shot of Orson Welles’s face), all style vanishes, the plot starts to curdle, and we are left in the Jaglom zone of sterile lighting …

If F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby had married Daisy — if the middle-class Midwestern boy’s dreams of achieving happiness through wealth had all come true — you might have wound up with something very close to the story told in this fascinating and intimate documentary about what does and does not …