Stephanie Zacharek

This is what happens with the death of an actor who figured in a massively popular franchise: because nearly everybody on the planet knows who Darth Vader is, nearly every mainstream news report of James Earl Jones’s death must associate […]

Desire isn’t just a feeling, it’s also a shape, a silhouette traced in the air with smoke, an empty, aching border waiting to be filled in. And once you slake desire, it’s gone—it has transformed into something else, something more

For those who have been following his career from the start, the idea of Pedro Almodóvar’s growing older—and increasingly using his films to reflect on illness and death, or at least just the inevitable slowdown that comes for most of

What separates a genius from the rest of us schmoes? That’s the question Brady Corbet—a prolific actor who’s gradually building a career as an inventive, out-there director—mines in The Brutalist, the story of a fictional mid-20th-century architect who, though acclaimed

August is typically a slow month for new releases, and this year was no exception. But if you look a little closer at the indies and international films that made their way to audiences this month, there are still some

You don’t have to love opera to love Maria Callas. She was bold but vulnerable, her life roiled by drama. Her voice reflected all the colors of paradise, as it was before Adam and Eve were kicked out. And her

Some filmmakers blossom when their audiences pronounce them great. Others respond by letting their worst impulses fly free, which seems to be what happened to Tim Burton: Over the past two decades or so his movies have become less flights