Stephanie Zacharek

Claude Sautet is the finest French filmmaker you’ve probably never heard of, a discerning craftsman who began his career in the late 1950s only to be swept aside by the unstoppable New Wave. Sautet was simply never a Nouvelle Vague type: He began his career as a screenwriter — he......

The Act of Forgiving Joshua Oppenheimer follows his 0x000AOscar nomination with The Look of Silence, 0x000Ataking a second look at a genocide In 2012, documentary filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer made a splash with The Act of Killing, in which he sought out members of Indonesian killing squads — individuals who had......

The opening of Antoine Fuqua's Southpaw, shot in gritty, grayed-out tones, is a grim harbinger: A fighter getting ready for the ring holds up his meaty paws for the ritualistic wrapping of gauze and tape. His gloves are slipped over the wrappings, and then they're taped on, too — but......

The problem with clamoring for more woman-led comedies is that actual comedy may be the thing that ends up being left by the wayside. Tina Fey, among others, has railed against the boneheaded dictum that women can't be funny. But in the current climate of watchfulness — one in which......

Hollywood lives by the simple, sad axiom "Where there's money, there's more money," which is how we get remakes of movies that sometimes shouldn't have been made in the first place, as well as two Spider-Man reboots within five years and a Star Wars franchise that ensures our children's children......

There's probably only one humanist film that opens with the words, "Merry Christmas eve, bitch!" accompanied by the proffering of a single, sprinkle-dusted doughnut. In Sean Baker's Tangerine, best friends, transgender women and prostitutes Sin-Dee and Alexandra (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor) catch up at a doughnut joint at......

The world of film noir is peopled with melancholy men trying to do the right thing, even when they don't quite know what the right thing is. Always — always — they fall for the wrong girl. Joseph Cotten's Holly Martins — the highly principled, if confused, heart of Carol......

The death of Amy Winehouse at age 27, in July 2011, was one of the first great tragedies of 21st-century pop music, an event — like the deaths of Tupac Shakur and Kurt Cobain in the last decade of the 20th — that emphasized the jarring contrast between the fragility......

Some movies are indefensible, and Ted 2 is one of them. Not only is this a movie about a libidinous, foul-mouthed stuffed bear; it's the sequel to an earlier movie about a libidinous, foul-mouthed stuffed bear. But I laughed and laughed at Ted 2 — as I did at the......

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl may not be the best teen cancer weepie ever made, if there even is a best teen cancer weepie. But it's surely the most adorable, for better or worse — less like The Fault in Our Stars and more like Diary of a......