Bilge Ebiri

Three Vietnam veterans — played by Bryan Cranston

Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying Never Snaps to Attention

Despite the many troubling trends in our media culture, the movies’ response to the Iraq War has been (gasp) surprisingly admirable. Since the mid-2000s, a steady stream of films have artfully addressed war’s aftermath and the homefront — from Stop-Loss and In the Valley of Elah, to Grace is Gone......
Deprived of his all-powerful hammer

Thor: Ragnarok Shows That Marvel Movies Can Still Hit Where It Counts

Like most of the better Marvel efforts, Thor: Ragnarok feels like the work of a unique sensibility instead of a huddle of brand managers. While the studio’s films demonstrated plenty of comic flair right from the start of its shared-universe experiment, with 2008’s Iron Man, recent efforts have veered too......
In Novitiate

Maggie Betts’ Novitiate Has Greatness — and a God-Shaped Hole

Maggie Betts’ Novitiate bears all the signs of an exceptional talent. It follows the experiences of Cathleen (Margaret Qualley), a teenager who enters a convent in the early 1960s just as the Catholic Church was starting to undergo the reforms of Vatican II. The title refers to the girls’ yearlong......
Director Joseph Kosinski's Only the Brave follows a group of firefighters who work the front lines of raging wildfires

Only the Brave Is One Big, Manly, Beautiful Ugly-Cry

In the opening shot of Only the Brave, a flaming bear — not just a bear that happens to be burning but one that looks as if it had been created entirely from fire — lunges at the camera in the middle of a blazing forest. The image returns a......