film review

Reminiscence indulges in the well-established cinematic tradition of playing with our perception of time. The French pioneer Georges Méliès did it successfully at the turn of the twentieth century, and Christopher Nolan is doing it in our time.

Trained assassins. Sins of the past and present. Double crosses. Exotic locales. Breezy banter. Name actors. Gaping plot holes. The Protégé has it all for you.

By curious coincidence, two of the lovelier movies I've seen so far this summer — the family-friendly animated fable Luca and the German art-house fairy tale Undine — tell stories about mythic sea creatures making contact with the human world. That's hardly a new concept, as we've seen in films as different as The Shape of Water, Aquaman and countless versions of The Little Mermaid. But as Luca and Undine demonstrate, there are still fresh stories to be dredged up from these watery depths.

There have been many fine films over the past several years about characters struggling with the onset of Alzheimer's disease and dementia, like Away From Her, Still Alice and the recent Colin Firth/Stanley Tucci drama Supernova. But few of them have gone as deeply and unnervingly into the recesses of a deteriorating mind as The Father, a powerful new chamber drama built around a mesmerizing lead performance from Anthony Hopkins.

Filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, now 90, has a gift for making riveting cinema from the minutiae of the everyday. His latest is a four-and-a-half hour documentary starring Boston City Hall, pre-COVID-19.

Though Anne Hathaway throws herself into the role of the Grand High Witch with obvious relish, she often seems to be straining for effect — which leaves The Witches feeling flat.

Ethan Hawke plays the famed Serbian American inventor in a new film that reminds us what a modern creature Tesla was — a figure from the past who never stopped pointing the way to the future.

Rosamund Pike stars in Radioactive, a biography of the pioneering scientist, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the only person to claim it in two different scientific disciplines (physics and chemistry). The director, Marjane Satrapi, the Oscar-nominated Iranian-French graphic novelist and filmmaker (Persepolis), tells the story in an ambitious but uneven fashion.

First the town disappears from Google Maps. Then a UFO appears — and a water truck is riddled with bullet holes. Bacurau is a community portrait, a horror thriller and a work of political filmmaking.

Autumn de Wilde's adaptation of the Jane Austen classic is as clever and rich as its famous heroine — in part, because its actors are so good at finding fresh nuances in this timeless material.