Movies

It’s a strange sensation to watch a film that seems to have been the product of a workshop at a corporate retreat, but that’s exactly what it feels like to watch “Wish,” the latest Disney animated feature. Ostensibly a 100-year anniversary celebration film of the Walt Disney Company, the story of “Wish” is extrapolated from the classic song “When You Wish Upon a Star,” which was originally written for “Pinocchio.” Writers Jennifer Lee and Allison Moore (working from a story by Lee, Moore and co-directors Chris Buck and Fawn Veerasunthorn) have dared to imagine, what if you wish upon a star? What then?

Diana Nyad is a name familiar to anyone who follows marathon swimming. Let’s be honest, though: That’s a pretty small assemblage.

Gather ‘round the table, horror fans, because Eli Roth is finally serving up his long-gestating holiday feast: the seasonal slasher movie “Thanksgiving.” The idea for this film got rolling some 16 years ago with the 2007 Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez double feature “Grindhouse,” in which Roth and his longtime friend Jeff Rendell cooked up a joke trailer inspired by their love of themed horror movies and a Massachusetts childhood spent just down the road from Plymouth, the site of the first Thanksgiving.

"Next Goal Wins" is, let's face it, a walking, talking cliché of a fact-based, come-from-behind, underdog sports movie - in every way but one: The team in question (the American Samoan national soccer team, which ignominiously lost to Australia 31-0 in the 2001 World Cup, the worst defeat in the history of international soccer) pretty much starts behind and stays behind. If you're looking for a stirring story of untapped grit that involves a championship game and a nail-biter victory, look somewhere else. (Say, "The Boys in the Boat," George Clooney's film about the 1936 Olympic crew team, opening Christmas Day.)

The Kennedy Center will bestow the 25th Mark Twain Prize for American Humor on its youngest recipient in more than a decade: Kevin Hart, the 44-year-old actor and comedian celebrated for his arena-packing stand-up shows and riotous screen presence.

Writer/director Kristoffer Borgli is interested in attention. Specifically, he’s interested in the paradoxical postmodern predicament of our addiction to attention, and the ways in which capitalism constantly cannibalizes it, chewing through our time, neurons and emotions like Pac-Man. In his debut feature “Sick of Myself,” set in his native Oslo, Norway, Borgli tracked one young woman’s desperate bids for attention through a series of contrived situations to showcase her suffering and martyrdom. In his second feature, “Dream Scenario,” Borgli sets his sights on America, and imagines what happens when someone gets too much attention for doing nothing at all.

The 2019 film “Captain Marvel” – a superhero origin story about the journey of fighter pilot Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) to adopt the mantle of the titular, cosmic-energy-enhanced champion – broke ground as the first woman-led feature in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. (Of course, it arrived two years after DC Comics’ invigorating “Wonder Woman” beat it to the punch, so to speak.) A new sequel, “The Marvels,” ups the representation ante by teaming Carol with two sidekicks: Pakistani American teenager Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), already known to franchise fans as the protagonist of the Disney Plus spinoff “Ms. Marvel,” about a Jersey City crime fighter who idolizes Carol’s alter ego, and Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), a Black astronaut who has somehow morphed from a little girl in “Captain Marvel” to a 30-something woman, while Carol, whom she calls her “aunt,” looks exactly the same.

When a filmmaker wants to create great drama, building a screenplay around a murder trial can be a good thing. Sometimes even a sure thing.

Thanksgiving entertainment tends to be dominated by football and parades. Compared to Christmas, there are relatively few specials and movies dedicated to the holiday.

'Pigeon Tunnel' asks who is the real John le Carré?

So much time had passed from the initial 2015 announcement of the film adaptation of Five Nights at Freddy’s that I was surprised to hear it was finally headed to screens this month. It was released Oct. 26 on the streaming service Peacock and hit theaters the following day.

Documentary explores the story of Rossetto, a housewife turned social worker who enabled incarcerated felons to return to society, and her partnership with Borovitz, an ex-con and recovering alcoholic, who becomes an ordained rabbi. Rossetto, a social worker, met Borovitz at a synagogue service while Rossetto was a social worker at the California Institute for Men.

Running into your biggest heartbreak in an airport is a relatable fantasy. The randomness of the encounter, the forced proximity and the ticking clock of a departing flight all make for a setting ripe for romantic reconciliation or cathartic closure. In her sophomore feature, star Meg Ryan brings this specific fantasy to (magical) reality in “What Happens Later,” a winsome reckoning with love lost, and then found, at least for a night.

At first glance, the combination of Priscilla Presley and Sofia Coppola looks like pop-culture catnip: Priscilla, who met pop idol Elvis Presley when she was just 14 and took up residence at Graceland a few years later, being portrayed by a filmmaker known for drenching viewers in gauzy, retro-tastic mood movies? Bring it on.

Jimmy Chin knows daredevils. He and his wife, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, directed 2018’s “Free Solo,” the Oscar-winning documentary of rock climber Alex Honnold’s ascent of El Capitan.

Passion at the heart of 'Killers of the Flower Moon'

When actor Ethan Hawke lived briefly in Atlanta as a child in the late 1970s, he recalled his mother embracing the Georgia gothic author Flannery O’Connor, who died of lupus in 1965 at age 39.

There’s a double-layered sense of self-reflective nostalgia baked into Alexander Payne’s misfit holiday movie “The Holdovers.” Set in 1970, there’s nostalgia for the time period, which is textured and rendered with care and conviction on-screen. But the film itself, a warm, spicy brew of humor, poignancy and irascible charm, also inspires the odd desire to be rewatching it while you’re watching it, a kind of nostalgia for the present moment. That funny feeling is reflected in the plot too, in which a trio of near strangers form an unlikely but indelible bond over Christmas break at a Massachusetts boarding school.