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Our film critics on blockbusters, independents and everything in between., latest articles, results sorted by select sort order newest oldest, the watchers.

• Fantasy, Horror, Mystery, Thriller
• Directed by Ishana Shyamalan

The folk-horror genre welcomes a young new voice in the director Ishana Night Shyamalan, but she’s singing a familiar old tune.

By Elisabeth Vincentelli

Banel & Adama

• Directed by Ramata-Toulaye Sy

The filmmaker Ramata-Toulaye Sy illuminates this elliptical story, set in unnamed Senegalese village, with daubs of strong colors and strikingly vivid imagery.

By Manohla Dargis

• Comedy, Drama
• Directed by Savi Gabizon

Richard Gere plays it way too cool as a man learning about the son he didn’t know he had.

By Ben Kenigsberg

I Used to Be Funny

• NYT Critic’s Pick
• Directed by Ally Pankiw

The film, which stars Rachel Sennott as a stand-up comedian, looks at the aftereffects of trauma on a character who wields quips as both weapon and shield.

By Amy Nicholson

• Directed by Daina Oniunas-Pusic

Julia Louis-Dreyfus journeys from denial to acceptance in this imaginative fantasy-drama about grief and motherhood.

By Jeannette Catsoulis

• Comedy, Drama, Romance
• Directed by Stephanie Allynne, Tig Notaro

Dakota Johnson stars in an expansive friendship comedy about coming out in your 30s and finding yourself.

By Alissa Wilkinson

Bad Boys: Ride or Die

• Action, Adventure, Comedy, Crime, Thriller
• Directed by Adil El Arbi, Bilall Fallah

In their latest buddy cop movie, Will Smith and Martin Lawrence are still speeding through Miami. The franchise has rarely felt so assured, relaxed and knowingly funny.

By Robert Daniels

The Dead Don’t Hurt

• Drama, Western
• Directed by Viggo Mortensen

Mortensen gives his film a nested, at times unnecessarily complicated structure, but with performances this good, it’s hard to mind much.

Young Woman and the Sea

• Biography, Drama, Romance, Sport
• Directed by Joachim Rønning

Daisy Ridley plays Gertrude Ederle, who persuades her father to pay for swim lessons, and then goes on to be a pioneer.

By Glenn Kenny

Haikyu!! The Dumpster Battle

• Animation, Comedy, Drama, Sport
• Directed by Susumu Mitsunaka

This film extends the story told in an anime series about high school volleyball teams.

By Maya Phillips

The Young Wife

• Directed by Tayarisha Poe

A beleaguered bride spirals on her wedding day in Tayarisha Poe’s stylish but overly familiar comedy-drama.

By Devika Girish

The Great Lillian Hall

• Directed by Michael Cristofer

Jessica Lange is ideally cast as a grande dame of the theater who is facing a reckoning in this well-crafted melodrama by Michael Cristofer.

In a Violent Nature

• Drama, Horror, Thriller
• Directed by Chris Nash

Chris Nash’s ultraviolent horror movie is an unexpectedly serene, almost dreamlike meditation on a murderous psyche.

• Directed by Tony Goldwyn

This drama centers on a boy with autism and his divorced dad, with a cast featuring Robert De Niro, Rose Byrne, Whoopi Goldberg and Bobby Cannavale.

By Natalia Winkelman

• Directed by D.W. Waterson

This queer high school movie, starring Devery Jacobs and Evan Rachel Wood, channels an after-school special without the coming-out trauma.

By Lisa Kennedy

Robot Dreams

• Animation, Drama, Family, Music
• Directed by Pablo Berger

This animated film from Pablo Berger is a silent wonder that says everything about love.

Handling the Undead

• Drama, Horror, Mystery
• Directed by Thea Hvistendahl

A zombie movie is wrapped in a gentle tale of mourning and love.

MoviePass, MovieCrash

• Documentary, Comedy, Crime, Drama
• Directed by Muta'Ali Muhammad

An illuminating documentary about the ill-fated (though now-revived) subscription service finds an unexpected story.

• Action, Adventure, Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller
• Directed by Brad Peyton

Jennifer Lopez stars in a sci-fi action thriller that wonders whether artificial intelligence is really all that bad.

The Beach Boys

• Documentary, Biography, Music
• Directed by Frank Marshall, Thom Zimny

This Disney documentary looks at the family ties and sweet harmonies that turned a California band into a popular treasure.

By Nicolas Rapold

• Drama, Romance
• Directed by Sophie Dupuis

Sophie Dupuis’s sensitive French Canadian drama takes a turn when a young, starry-eyed drag queen (Théodore Pellerin) opens up to questionable figures.

By Beatrice Loayza

Queen of the Deuce

• Documentary, Biography
• Directed by Valerie Kontakos

This warm remembrance of a Times Square legend is too careful with its iconoclastic heroine.

• Biography, Drama, History
• Directed by Andrew Hyatt

Based on the real life of the pioneering ophthalmologist Ming Wang, this movie follows the character’s struggle to see inside himself.

The Garfield Movie

• Animation, Adventure, Comedy, Family, Fantasy
• Directed by Mark Dindal

Garfield, voiced by Chris Pratt, is joined by Samuel L. Jackson as his father, in an inert big-screen adaptation that fundamentally misunderstands its protagonist.

By Brandon Yu

• Action, Comedy, Crime, Romance
• Directed by Richard Linklater

Glen Powell stars in one of the year’s funniest, sexiest, most enjoyable movies — and somehow it’s surprisingly deep, too.

Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara

• Drama, History
• Directed by Marco Bellocchio

This film, based on a true story about the kidnapping of a Jewish child in 19th-century Italy, underscores the devastating consequences of family separation.

The Strangers: Chapter 1

• Directed by Renny Harlin

A reboot of the 2008 home invasion film “The Strangers” brings back masked assailants and brutal violence but leaves originality behind.

By Erik Piepenburg

• Documentary
• Directed by Richard Shepard

The director Richard Shepard details his lifelong obsession with movies in this enthusiastic video essay.

By Calum Marsh

• Directed by Hong Sang-soo

The Korean director Hong Sang-soo winds together the slenderest strands of two intersecting stories to make a tender film about simple pleasures.

• Animation, Comedy, Drama, Family, Fantasy
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New York, New York review: Start spreadin' the news... there's a new Phantom on Broadway

The deeply flawed, but deeply entertaining musical from Kander and Ebb (with a little help from Lin-Manuel Miranda) has arrived at the St. James Theater.

Lester Fabian Brathwaite is a staff writer at Entertainment Weekly , where he covers breaking news, all things Real Housewives , and a rich cornucopia of popular culture. Formerly a senior editor at Out magazine, his work has appeared on NewNowNext , Queerty , Rolling Stone , and The New Yorker . He was also the first author signed to Phoebe Robinson's Tiny Reparations imprint. He met Oprah once.

When it closed on April 16 , Phantom of the Opera left a chandelier-sized hole in live theater. The longest running show in Broadway history, Phantom was the destination for tourists and musical theater neophytes alike — an accessible, simply fine but highly enjoyable show that peaks by the end of Act I.

I was never a fan of Phantom . Or Andrew Lloyd Webber for that matter. His musicals always seemed to have one good song surrounded by a lot of forgettable fluff. But nearly 20 million people can't be that wrong. That's how many people had seen the 1988 Best Musical Tony winner when it closed earlier this month. There's still no shortage of shows to see on The Great White Way, but when it comes to pure populist entertainment, New York, New York might be the closest thing on offer this season.

Loosely based on the 1977 Martin Scorsese picture starring Robert De Niro and Liza Minnelli as mid-century musicians turned lovers turned divorcees in the greatest city in the world, this production features some of the songs written for the film by John Kander and Fred Ebb (the dynamic duo behind Cabaret and Chicago ) with additional lyrics by some Broadway baby named Lin-Manuel Miranda .

The Scorsese film might seem like an odd choice since it's one of the director's his least successful outings — despite its ubiquitous theme song that's become the unofficial anthem of the city bearing its name. But by 1977, the Hollywood musical was on life support, and New York, New York still bore the dark world view Scorsese had explored to much greater success in the previous year's Taxi Driver .

In the movie, De Niro's Jimmy Doyle walks out on Minnelli's Francine Evans after she gives birth to their son. They don't get a happily ever after. Without giving anything away, the Broadway version makes sure Jimmy (played here by a charmingly eccentric Colton Ryan) and Francine (the effervescent Anna Uzele) do. This is a crowdpleaser, after all.

The script by David Thompson with Sharon Washington is of little concern here. There are a number of generic storylines (big dreams! in the big city!) with equally generic dialogue, intersecting with one another like pedestrians on a busy sidewalk, that ultimately just serve to tie one gorgeous musical sequence to another. But who comes to a musical for the plot? The songs, however, don't fare much better.

Kander and Ebb are responsible for some of the 20th century's greatest and most memorable showtunes, though their most enduring contribution may be "New York, New York." In the video above, Kander reveals that De Niro originally didn't like the song and after they furiously went back and re-wrote it, the result became the classic standard we all know and love. With "New York, New York," in its pocket, which smartly isn't whipped out till the very end, there's a bona fide hit already in the show.

Fred Ebb, who handled the lyrics while Kander tended to the music, died in 2004. Miranda, having some big shoes to fill, infuses a bit of life and Latin flare into some of the songs, but they just aren't it. The performers sell the hell out of 'em... but the effort is visible. The entire show is built around one song, a great song, leaving the rest of the music to serve as a placeholder till we get to it. Thankfully, it's worth it.

Ryan isn't the best singer, but he's a magnetic presence (he may be familiar to some for his fantastic turn as a murderous mechanic on Poker Face ) that holds the ramshackle central love story together. And Uzele has a Minnelli-esque commitment and zeal to bringing a show home come hell or high water that buoys the rest of the production. Angel Sigala as Mateo Diaz, a Cuban immigrant determined to pursue his musical aspirations, and Emily Skinner as Madame Veltri, a violin teacher who takes on a Polish refugee as a student, are also standouts.

But the real star of the show is Susan Stroman, whose blockbuster direction and choreography make up for the relatively lackluster songs. Beowulf Boritt's lush, imaginative scenic design at times threatens to eclipse the performers, but they're usually up for the challenge. Each minute of New York, New York is buzzing with life, as background dancers and actors flit in and out of view, telling clever little visual stories, giving New York, New York the energy of its titular city.

It's great when theater is transgressive, or provocative, or culture-shifting , but there's something to be said for pure entertainment. While New York, New York lightly grazes serious social issues affecting 1947 New York, it's main objective is to show you a good time. It's two and a half hours (much like a subway ride: overlong, but crammed with movement) of dancing, belting, dazzling set pieces and costumes, and ending with a big flourish.

Do the songs and the story weigh it down? Sure, but they're both generic and inoffensive as to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. Just like Phantom of the Opera . It was poetic, then, as I was waiting to go into the St. James Theater to see New York, New York , that the sets for Phantom were being carted out across the street. Out with the old, in with the New York, New York . Grade: B

Related content:

• Summer, 1976 review: Laura Linney and Jessica Hecht soar on Broadway
• Good Night, Oscar review: More like 'Hello, Tony' — Sean Hayes strikes gold on Broadway
• Prima Facie review: Jodie Comer makes a remarkable Broadway debut in Suzie Miller's one-woman show

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Martin Scorsese's "Gangs of New York" rips up the postcards of American history and reassembles them into a violent, blood-soaked story of our bare-knuckled past. The New York it portrays in the years between the 1840s and the Civil War is, as a character observes, "the forge of hell," in which groups clear space by killing their rivals. Competing fire brigades and police forces fight in the streets, audiences throw rotten fruit at an actor portraying Abraham Lincoln, blacks and Irish are chased by mobs, and Navy ships fire on the city as the poor riot against the draft.

The film opens with an extraordinary scene set beneath tenements, in catacombs carved out of the Manhattan rock. An Irish-American leader named Priest Vallon ( Liam Neeson ) prepares for battle almost as if preparing for the Mass--indeed, as he puts on a collar to protect his neck, we think for a moment he might be a priest. With his young son Amsterdam trailing behind, he walks through the labyrinth of this torchlit Hades, gathering his forces, the Dead Rabbits, before stalking out into daylight to fight the forces of a rival American-born gang, the Nativists.

Men use knives, swords, bayonets, cleavers, cudgels. The ferocity of their battle is animalistic. At the end, the field is littered with bodies--including that of Vallon, slain by his enemy William Cutting, aka Bill the Butcher ( Daniel Day-Lewis ). This was the famous gang fight of Five Points on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, recorded in American history but not underlined. When it is over, Amsterdam disappears into an orphanage, the ominously named Hellgate House of Reform. He emerges in his early 20s (now played by Leonardo DiCaprio ) and returns to Five Points, still ruled by Bill, and begins a scheme to avenge his father.

The vivid achievement of Scorsese's film is to visualize this history and people it with characters of Dickensian grotesquerie. Bill the Butcher is one of the great characters in modern movies, with his strangely elaborate diction, his choked accent, his odd way of combining ruthlessness with philosophy. The canvas is filled with many other colorful characters, including a pickpocket named Jenny Everdeane ( Cameron Diaz ), a hired club named Monk ( Brendan Gleeson ), the shopkeeper Happy Jack ( John C. Reilly ), and historical figures such as William "Boss" Tweed ( Jim Broadbent ), ruler of corrupt Tammany Hall, and P.T. Barnum ( Roger Ashton-Griffiths ), whose museum of curiosities scarcely rivals the daily displays on the streets.

Scorsese's hero, Amsterdam, plays much the same role as a Dickens hero like David Copperfield or Oliver Twist: He is the eyes through which we see the others but is not the most colorful person on the canvas. Amsterdam is not as wild, as vicious or as eccentric as the people around him, and may not be any tougher than his eventual girlfriend Jenny, who like Nancy in Oliver Twist is a hellcat with a fierce loyalty to her man. DiCaprio's character, more focused and centered, is a useful contrast to the wild men around him.

Certainly, Day-Lewis is inspired by an intense ferocity, laced with humor and a certain analytical detachment, as Bill the Butcher. He is a fearsome man, fond of using his knife to tap his glass eye, and he uses a pig carcass to show Amsterdam the various ways to kill a man with a knife. Bill is a skilled knife artist, and terrifies Jenny, his target for a knife-throwing act, not only by coming close to killing her but also by his ornate and ominous word choices.

Diaz plays Jenny as a woman who at first insists on her own independence; as a pickpocket, she ranks high in the criminal hierarchy, and even dresses up to prey on the rich people uptown. But when she finally caves in to Amsterdam's love, she proves tender and loyal, in one love scene where they compare their scars, and another where she nurses him back to health.

The movie is straightforward in its cynicism about democracy at that time. Tammany Hall buys and sells votes, ethnic groups are delivered by their leaders, and when the wrong man is elected sheriff he does not serve for long. That American democracy emerged from this cauldron is miraculous. We put the Founding Fathers on our money, but these Founding Crooks for a long time held sway.

Scorsese is probably our greatest active American director ( Robert Altman is another candidate), and he has given us so many masterpieces that this film, which from another director would be a triumph, arrives as a more measured accomplishment. It was a difficult film to make, as we know from the reports that drifted back from the vast and expensive sets constructed at Cinecitta in Rome. The budget was enormous, the running time was problematical.

The result is a considerable achievement, a revisionist history linking the birth of American democracy and American crime. It brings us astonishing sights, as in a scene that shows us the inside of a tenement, with families stacked on top of one another in rooms like shelves. Or in the ferocity of the Draft Riots, which all but destroyed the city. It is instructive to be reminded that modern America was forged not in quiet rooms by great men in wigs, but in the streets, in the clash of immigrant groups, in a bloody Darwinian struggle.

All of this is a triumph for Scorsese, and yet I do not think this film is in the first rank of his masterpieces. It is very good but not great. I wrote recently of "Goodfellas" that "the film has the headlong momentum of a storyteller who knows he has a good one to share." I didn't feel that here. Scorsese's films usually leap joyfully onto the screen, the work of a master in command of his craft. Here there seems more struggle, more weight to overcome, more darkness. It is a story that Scorsese has filmed without entirely internalizing. The gangsters in his earlier films are motivated by greed, ego and power; they like nice cars, shoes, suits, dinners, women. They murder as a cost of doing business. The characters in "Gangs of New York" kill because they like to and want to. They are bloodthirsty, and motivated by hate. I think Scorsese liked the heroes of "Goodfellas," " Casino " and " Mean Streets ," but I'm not sure he likes this crowd.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film credits.

Gangs of New York (2002)

Rated R For Intense Strong Violence, Sexuality/Nudity and Language

165 minutes

Leonardo DiCaprio as Amsterdam Vallon

Daniel Day-Lewis as Bill The Butcher

Cameron Diaz as Jenny Everdeane

Liam Neeson as Priest Vallon

John C. Reilly as Happy Jack

Henry Thomas as Johnny

Brendan Gleeson as Monk

Roger Ashton-Griffiths as P.T. Barnum

Jim Broadbent as "Boss" Tweed

Directed by

• Martin Scorsese
• Steven Zaillian
• Kenneth Lonergan

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“ The Watchers ” is the first film directed by Ishana Night Shyamalan , the 24-year-old daughter of M. Night Shyamalan. Its title refers to a race of spindly ash-gray monsters who haunt an Irish woods, gathering at night around a concrete fortress where the film’s four characters have holed up in a state of semi-permanent refuge. The building has just one room, an entire wall of which is a two-way mirror through which the Watchers peer, all because..they like to watch.

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Mina ( Dakota Fanning ), who vapes her way through her job at a pet store in Galway, is asked to deliver a talking orange parrot to a client in Belfast. During the trip, she drives through a sinister forest full of trees with tall straight thin trunks, only to get out and discover that her car has vanished, and that she’s now trapped. In the prelude sequence, we’ve already seen someone get sucked into a hole in the ground of this woods; we also saw a sign that says “Point of no return” coupled with a mysterious numeral (108).

Madeleine, a former professor of folklore, lays down the law, and there are plenty of them. At night, the characters must stand in a line in front of the mirror, so that the Watchers can gawk at them. During the day, they’re allowed to go outside, but can’t go past those “Point of no return” signs. They can’t go into the holes (though Mina, at one point, does, emerging with an old bicycle and several other artifacts). Yet even as I was trying to get the hang of the situation, I kept thinking of other, more basic questions, like: Where do the characters sleep? (The only furniture in the room is a red leather armchair and a lamp.) What do they eat? (There’s a reference to hunting, and we see a crow being killed, but the movie doesn’t get more specific than that.) And how do they pass the time without Wi-Fi?

Because, you see, they have been stuck in this house, known as the Coop, for a while. The brash Daniel (Oliver Finnegan) has been there for eight months, the more circumspect Ciara (Georgina Campbell) has been there for five months (it turns out her that her husband, John, disappeared — he was the victim in the opening scene), and Madeleine seems like she’s been there forever. She runs the place with an iron hand, so we know there’s more to her than meets the eye. Are these woodland survivors a cult that she’s the secret leader of?

Mina has a backstory of trauma, involving the death of her mother 15 years ago. It seems that she was not a well-behaved girl, and that she was acting up in the back seat of the car when her mother, trying to deal with her, smashed into another vehicle. So young Mina was responsible for her mother’s death. The reason this is relevant is that it connects with the backstory of the Watchers. They’re a race of fallen elves (or something), who covet humanity, but the more we learn about them the less interesting they become. That’s in part because they’re envisioned as tall, scaly-skinned beasts who scuttle around with that amplified liquid percussive sound that makes you go, “Oh, it’s Predator!” Not a lot of mystery there.

Reviewed at Dolby 88, New York, June 5, 2024. MPA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 102 MIN.

• Production: A Warner Bros. Pictures release of a New Line Cinema, Blinding Edge Pictures, Inimitable Pictures production. Producers: M. Night Shyamalan, Ashwin Rajan, Nomitt Mankad. Executive producers: Jo Homewood, Stephen Dembitzer.
• Crew: Director, screenplay: Ishana Night Shyamalan. Camera: Eli Arenson. Editor: Job ter Burg. Music: Abel Korzeniowski.
• With: Dakota Fanning, Georgina Campbell, Oliver Finnegan, Olwen Fouéré.

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‘quad gods’ review: hbo’s esports documentary upends one-size-fits-all disability storytelling.

Premiering at Tribeca, Jess Jacklin's film looks at three members of an all-quadriplegic esports team that blends rehab, socializing and competition.

By Daniel Fienberg

Daniel Fienberg

Chief Television Critic

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An effectively conventional documentary that would probably work better as a 90-minute pilot for an ongoing docuseries than as a standalone film, Jess Jacklin’s Quad Gods does one unconventional thing extremely well.

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Quad Gods is a disability story and a sports story, but it pushes back, and pushes back hard, against the traditional arcs of its respective genres. It’s a sports film without a championship game and a film about disabilities that rejects a one-size-fits-all restorative journey. It’s an anti-arc that occasionally makes Quad Gods a little unsatisfying in the moment and all the more powerful upon reflection.

The documentary’s heroes are part of the Quad Gods, a New York-based team competing in the world of adaptive esports, which brings accessibility to the already cutthroat world of connected electronic gaming — specifically the first all-quadriplegic esports team.

The primary subjects are Richard, Prentice and Blake, though other Quad Gods players are included, just not with the same depth. Over the course of the documentary, we learn about the circumstances behind their disabilities — a shooting, a bike accident and a football injury — but that’s not really what the film is about.

Once he brings the men together and the idea of a gaming team is broached — “The Wheel Deal” and “Spinal Tap” are rejected team names — you think you know where Quad Gods is going. But you don’t. This isn’t a “facing adversity and learning to overcome it” film, and despite the centrality of adaptive esports to the documentary’s basic premise, it’s barely a documentary about adaptive esports. The truth, as we quickly discover, is that these men — the team’s one female participant, Nyree, is one of the secondary figures — aren’t a monolith and don’t have a single goal.

We’ve been trained as viewers to expect the familiar arc and its absence is jarring on a subconscious level — “Why aren’t they gaming more?” is a question I can easily imagine some viewers posing. At the same time, taking people whom outsiders probably conceive of as united by their disability, splitting them apart and making them come to life as individuals is more complicated and provocative, even if the sensation never left my mind that 87 minutes wasn’t enough time for the full project.

With his intense competitive drive and touching relationship with his daughter, Richard comes across as the most dimensional of the participants. Prentice and Blake are presented as contrasts — two former football players, one concentrating on the future and possibly walking again, the other finding peace and joy in the present.

Opening things up further is the animation by Tim Fox, a solid version of what has become a documentary cliché in recent years, using video-game aesthetics to show the way the real and virtual worlds are blurring. It’s a device I’ve seen enough times that I’ve come to feel it works best in the absence of other available footage, or when available footage might otherwise give the impression of claustrophobia. The thing that’s so fantastic and inspiring about the Quad Gods, though, is the constant activity and energy in their lives, which make the extra flourishes feel gratuitous. There isn’t a single person who will watch Quad Gods and not come away feeling that these guys are badasses and warriors. I get why it’s fun to then visualize them as muscle-bound combat warriors and whatnot, but … they’re already there.

I still think Quad Gods is/could be/should be a pilot for a TV series, which means I want more — more characterization, more depth, more esports — and that’s praise in and of itself.

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