Peter Debruge

Reviews will have to wait till the Cannes Film Festival kicks off on May 14, but it’s not too early for a critic to weigh in on this year’s lineup — or how it looks on paper, at least, and what the selection might say about the state of things. At the top of the […]

Key to the ongoing conversations about Latino representation in the U.S. entertainment industry is the need for the diversification of stories, which in turn would breed valuable specificity. Rather than expecting one production to speak strongly to every single subset of the vast Latino community, projects should reflect the unique microcosms and experiences that speak […]

Long before she was a movie star, a teenage Nicole Kidman appeared in the early-’80s action comedy “BMX Bandits,” a rowdy Australian kidpic full of bicycle stunts and Scooby-Doo crime-stopping shenanigans. It’s too early to say whether any of the adorable young leads in “Riddle of Fire” will go on to have successful acting careers. […]

While the experimental premise of “Azrael” is commendable on paper — a wordless, gore-filled revenge indie about a woman escaping a religious cult, as well as zombies of some sort — the film finds itself unable to visually convey many basic tenets of its story. In struggling to reconcile image and meaning, it ends up […]

SPOILER ALERT: The last two paragraphs of this review contains spoilers. “Mamífera” introduces 40-year-old Lola (Maria Rodríguez Soto) having tender sex with boyfriend Bruno (Enric Auquer), standing up in the shower. Then, sitting on their bed, they dry off together, him seated behind her, carefully using a hairdryer on her hair, and at one point […]

When you’re 10, it sounds like every line your favorite boy band sings is being aimed directly at you. Somewhere along the line, the illusion shatters. Teenagers are smarter than we give them credit for, and they eventually figure out how parasocial relationships operate: Basically, the fans do all the work, saving up for concert […]

Music has an almost magical way of transporting us back to the moment in our lives when we heard it: the pop song that underscored your first kiss, the one that played at your graduation and so on. In mopey, dopey YA weepie “The Greatest Hits,” writer-director Ned Benson takes that idea as literally as […]

The press are the good guys, but also kind of the bad guys, in Alex Garland’s virtuosic “Civil War,” a jarring ground-level account of what a near-future disunification of the United States might look like. Intended as a wake-up call, the long-fuse thriller — which starts slow and snowballs to a jaw-dropping raid on Washington, […]

In 99% of Hollywood movies, the goal is to make the stunt work invisible. Audiences are supposed to believe that the star — or better yet, the character he plays — put his own life at risk jumping off buildings, blowing up cars or duking it out with squads of bad guys. In “The Fall […]

In a strange reversal of a longstanding trend with the Academy, this year’s documentary short ballot is almost entirely domestic (which is to say, films made by or about Americans), while the feature doc category — where subtitles aren’t so common — is entirely international. Judging by the overall quality of the films in the […]