Hollywood continues to pay reparations for Gone With the Wind with this elegiac adaptation of Solomon Northrup’s autobiographical saga of a free black man forced into bondage for a dozen years. They might just as well have named it The Passion of the Slave. Chiwetel Ejiofor suffers well under the …

Roland Emmerich's widest view of disaster to date: the sky-high eruption of Yellowstone (Old Faithful gone Vesuvius), the toppling of the Washington Monument and St. Peter's Basilica (the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower would be so old-hat), the block-by-block collapse of Los Angeles (a rented limo outrunning the …

Formula underworld drama poured into an epic template. Like Jiffy-brand waffle batter spread over an iron the size of a billiard table. "Based on a true story," it traces, in separate intertwined storylines, the converging upward paths of criminal and cop: the former (Denzel Washington) starting out as the servile …

The basic idea — from a novel by P.D. James, a departure from her detective fiction — of a worldwide plague of female infertility, even though not at all original (see The Handmaid's Tale, as a prime example), remains nevertheless a potent metaphor for that science-fiction staple, the End of …

The bicontinental British filmmaker Stephen Frears returns to the milieu of his Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and My Beautiful Laundrette -- the London melting pot, but this time in the grimmer mood of a Thirties-style social drama (the Warners studio, most typically), with a rough, raw, skinned-knuckle image and …

Not only does this mark Sam Raimi’s return to the screen since The Great and Powerful Oz failed to live up to its title, it’s his first comic book movie in 15 years. It’s as good a cast as any Marvel’s assembled (Benedict Cumberbatch, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Elizabeth Olsen, Rachel McAdams, …

The titular quartet, all adopted, all acknowledged "fuck-ups," are of two races, evenly divided, black and white, and reunited for the Turkey Day funeral of their sainted mother, murdered in the course of a liquor-store holdup. "I didn't come back here for the funeral," explains the Mark Wahlberg one, making …

Unabashedly commercial enterprise from Spike Lee, a lightweight heist-and-hostage caper with a heavyweight cast: Clive Owen as the bank-job mastermind, Denzel Washington as the New York cop who catches the call, Jodie Foster as the smugly enigmatic free-lance troubleshooter with friends in high places ("My bite's much worse than my …

Painless gender-bender comedy about a staid old British shoemaking firm ("since 1895"), which, to survive in the brazen new world, seeks out a "niche market," namely women's shoes for men, under the counsel of a cabaret drag queen: "Look to the heel.... The sex is in the heel." (Quality craftsmanship …

Kids: stay in school, especially if you plan on becoming an astronaut. When a freak accident (wind-loosed antenna piercing bio-monitor) leads to his being stranded on the red planet, astro-botanist Matt Damon decides he ain't got time to muse on fate, the fragility of existence, or man's place in the …

Woody Allen throws his two cents into the alternative-reality forum. Two playwrights, one tragic and the other comic, are sitting in a New York bistro arguing their respective Weltanschauungs, when a tablemate proposes to tell a true story, and let the playwrights decide whether it's a tragedy or a comedy. …

Chiwetel Ejiofor faces death, just like you will some day.

David Mamet’s two cents on the Mixed Martial Arts craze. His first film since Spartan, four years before, again brims with Spartan machismo. “Control your emotions.” “A man distracted is a man defeated.” “Conquer your fear and you conquer your opponent.” These directives, and others out of the same playbook, …

The Cold War refrozen: a subterranean population of Russian “sleeper” agents in a Destroy America operation that dates back to Lee Harvey Oswald. For a short time the film, like its patient spies, puts up a decent front. Director Phillip Noyce, who owns such respectable credits in the genre as …

It’s no secret that Secret in Their Eyes is an English-language remake of 2010’s Best Foreign Film Oscar of the same name. Like it’s namesake, Secret relies on a series of intricate flashbacks, the narrative constantly, often confusingly jumping between 2002 and 2015 with 9/11 an obvious substitute for Argentina’s …