Stephanie Zacharek

Iris Apfel isn't exactly a household name, unless we're talking about very stylish households. From 1950 to 1992 Apfel ran Old World Weavers, the business she co-founded with her husband, Carl, which faithfully re-created antique textiles for use in home decorating. From grand Park Avenue drapes to demure White House......

Though it's hard to believe in 2015, there was a time when fictional heroines didn't have to be role models, when a character's backbone could be more than just a row of vertebrae lined up into teachable moments. It's wonderful that modern readers love Jane Austen — we still warm......

The sequence that opens True Story tells you plenty about what you're in for: A rumpled teddy bear drifts down from our vantage point like a puffy brown snowflake, landing with slow-motion deliberateness on the form of a PJ-clad toddler curled up in a suitcase, seemingly asleep. She's like an......

No one likes the idea of growing older, and anyone who claims he does is lying, either to you or to herself. The anxiety of aging actors is particularly acute, not necessarily because they feel the passage of time intensely but because, having the privilege of watching their faces change......

You may, like me, have seen all of the Fast and Furious movies, and you may, like me, have enjoyed most or many of them. You may also, like me, have a hard time remembering exactly what happened in each film. You needn't worry. The franchise's Wikipedia page is filled......

The close-up, ostensibly one of a filmmaker's most valuable tools, is now so overused that it's practically meaningless. Thanks to TV — and to our habit of watching big-screen movies on increasingly smaller ones — we're now so used to seeing a shot of one actor talking, followed by a......

When you're young, to be old — even just the 44 kind of old — is unimaginable. Yet no one who has ever turned 44, or 54 or 74, can tell you how it happened. There's no single moment of passing to the other side of the looking glass; the......

In The Gunman, Sean Penn, at age 54, looks neither old nor young. He's been in training to look this age for a long time. Even as a relative kid, in 1982's Fast Times at Ridgemont High, his sailor-on-shore-leave mug had a wry, quizzical roughness to it; it was the......

The new Brooklyn is generally derided as a wilderness of double-wide strollers, young men with the facial hair of Canadian loggers circa 1852, and artisanal everything. But in Wild Canaries, a modestly scaled murder mystery/comedy from writer-director-star Lawrence Michael Levine, today's Brooklyn is a place of danger and intrigue. Just......

Almost immediately after it was released, 2011 stealth hit The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel became more a punchline than a movie. Who knew "older" people were so starved for pictures featuring gorgeously shot exotic locales, not to mention people falling in love, falling out of love or desperately hoping for......