“I’m so proud to receive this,” said Steve Martin, accepting the 2005 Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. “The only significant American award for comedy, except for money.” It’s a perfectly judged quip, delivered with late-period Martin’s trademark deadpan grandiosity. But it’s not quite true. A comedian’s significance can also be measured by the pedigree […]

It is 1989 New Mexico in Rose Glass’s “Love Lies Bleeding,” and it is also not. Despite the radio reporting the fall of the Berlin Wall and some very “Just Say No”-era drug busts, this is a mythic 1980s and a mythic USA, peopled by venal desperados pulled from the mildewed pages of a 1950s […]

Dakota Johnson isn’t an obvious choice for a superhero. Best known for “Fifty Shades of Grey,” the actress mostly exudes a laid-back, half-lidded, even soporific energy that only rarely rears up with intensity, as it did in her acclaimed supporting performance in “The Lost Daughter.” But that may be precisely the best argument for casting […]

“Bob Marley: One Love” is bookended by two concerts, in 1976 and 1978, both intended to foster peace in a Jamaica that had long been polarized by political violence. Such a narrow time frame for this story of the reggae pioneer, who died in 1981 at the age of 36 from skin cancer, is unusual. […]

The equal parts forgettable and regrettable teen comedy “Lisa Frankenstein” stars Kathryn Newton (best known as Paul Rudd’s daughter in the latest “Ant-Man” movie) as the title character, a mopey high school misfit whose spiritual predecessors are “Beetlejuice”-era Winona and “Desperately Seeking Susan”-era Madonna. Those references are just two in a zillion that hang on […]

In “The Zone of Interest,” Jonathan Glazer’s new Oscar-nominated film examining compartmentalized evil during the Holocaust, the director makes the choice not to depict the horrific acts occurring inside the death camps. Instead, a majority of the scenes take place immediately outside the walls of Auschwitz in occupied Poland, in and around the family home […]

The awards air Sunday night on CBS.

There was a bittersweet symmetry to be found in learning of the death of Norman Jewison just a day before the announcement of this year’s Oscar nominees. Jewison, who died Saturday at age 97, was one of the great journeyman directors in Hollywood, the stylistically unobtrusive craftsman who brought the gripping civil rights-era drama “In […]

Set on the International Space Station, the movie “I.S.S.” is a modest but satisfyingly suspenseful thriller whose central conflict between the six members of the station’s half-American, half-Russian crew is precipitated by a decidedly earthbound crisis. Shortly after arriving aboard the research facility – a high-tech, orbiting laboratory where we’re told its harmoniously cohabitating scientists […]