Stephanie Zacharek

Ralph Rainger and Leo Robin's sweet nectarine of a jazz standard "Easy Living" figures, in a glancing yet potent way, in Todd Haynes' Carol, adapted from Patricia Highsmith's 1952 novel The Price of Salt. Although the lyrics speak of contentment — "Living for you is easy living/It's easy to live......

How do you dramatize the unthinkable? On Aug. 5, 2010, 33 Chilean miners were trapped when the 100-year-old gold and copper mine in which they were working collapsed around them. For weeks, no one knew if they were alive or dead. But 69 days later, after a team of international......

Because women are particularly beguiling when viewed from behind, the camera loves to follow them: Anyone who's watched James Stewart's lovesick detective trailing Kim Novak, a platinum dream poured into a pale gray flannel hourglass, understands the voyeurism at the heart of Vertigo. With Spectre — the 24th James Bond......

Newspapers are dead, except in the hearts of anyone who has ever loved them — which means there are still narrow slivers of hope. One of them now comes to us in the form of a movie: Tom McCarthy's bold, shirtsleeve-sturdy newsroom drama Spotlight, which shows how a team of......

Before Anthony Bourdain published Kitchen Confidential in 2000, mere mortals who simply eat in restaurants had little idea about the drinking, debauchery and drug use rampant among the folks responsible for getting their fettuccine alfredo to the table. The book was eye-opening if true, and a rambunctious, vicarious pleasure even......

Comedy isn't the champagne of bottled beers; it's Champagne, period, a delicate and perfect achievement in itself when it works. That's why it's frustrating when great comic performers feel compelled to prove themselves in what we so solemnly call dramatic roles. The scarily brilliant Robin Williams stumbled into love-me mawkishness......

Hou Hsiao-hsien's The Assassin is the Taiwanese director's first foray into the martial-arts genre. It may also be his most resplendent film yet: Watching it is like floating along on a sumptuous gold-and-lacquer cloud. Hou favorite Shu Qi (who also starred in Millennium Mambo and Three Times) plays Nie Yinniang,......

Those of us who have been waiting forever for Joseph Gordon-Levitt to make a musical now have the next best thing: In Robert Zemeckis' The Walk, this breezy Puck of an actor plays high-wire artist Philippe Petit, who walked the space between the World Trade Center's twin towers in 1974......

Desperation, anxiety, stubbornly saying yes to survival: If grand struggles are your thing, there are plenty in Ridley Scott's The Martian, based on Andy Weir's popular novel, which was first self-published in 2011 and then picked up by Crown in 2014 — itself a rare seedling that took root against......

Some veteran filmmakers try to capture the younger generation and fail to get it right, coming up with characters and faux with-it dialogue that invite lots of "Oh, Mom!" eye-rolling. That's not the problem with writer-director Nancy Meyers's The Intern, in which retiree Robert De Niro finds meaning in life......