Film

A new documentary explores how women in Hollywood are pushing for more representation in front of and behind the camera. Davis and director Maria Giese discuss the dramatic disparities on screen.

Filmmaker Rodney Evans is still making movies, despite having lost much of his vision. His new documentary is about how he and three other blind or visually impaired artists continue to do their work.

The title character in the coolly engrossing new movie Luce is a high school student who seems exemplary from every angle. Played in a remarkable performance by Kelvin Harrison Jr., Luce Edgar is handsome and popular, an academic and athletic star who gives inspiring speeches at school assemblies. You wouldn't guess that Luce spent his early years as a child soldier in the war-torn country of Eritrea, a trauma that he's clearly worked hard to overcome with the help of his adoptive parents, played by Naomi Watts and Tim Roth, whom he lives with in Arlington, Va.

Film critic Justin Chang reviews the new Quentin Tarantino film One Upon a Time in Hollywood.

When Wang's grandmother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, the family flew to China to see her, but decided not to tell her the prognosis. "I turned out to be a surprisingly good liar," Wang says.

The best scene in Disney's incredibly photo-realistic remake of The Lion King features a computer-generated beetle rolling a ball of computer-generated dung across a computer-generated African landscape. It might sound mundane, but this particular ball of dung is carrying a tuft of fur from the runaway lion Simba, and its eventual discovery will renew hope that the rightful king of the savanna is alive and well. It's a funny, touching reminder that in the circle of life, every little creature and every lump of waste has an important role to play.

Film critic Justin Chang reviews 'The Farewell' the second feature by the Chinese-American writer director Lulu Wang. It tells a story from her own family's experience about a young woman who travels to China to pay a final visit to her grandmother, who has no idea that she has only a few months to live.

In the viscerally unnerving films of Ari Aster, there's nothing more horrific than the reality of human grief. His haunted-house thriller, Hereditary, followed a family rocked by traumas so devastating that the eventual scenes of devil-worshipping naked boogeymen almost came as a relief. Aster's new movie, Midsommar, doesn't pack quite as terrifying a knockout punch, but it casts its own weirdly hypnotic spell. This is a slow-burning and deeply absorbing piece of filmmaking, full of strikingly beautiful images and driven less by shocks than ideas.

Justin Chang reviews the new film by director Danny Boyle that imagines everyone has no memory of the Beatles except one singer/songwriter.

The remarkable story of the first all-female crew to compete in an around-the world sailing race. In 1989, 26 year old skipper Tracy Edwards set out on what was an unthinkable journey for a woman - to sail the 33,000 mile Whitbread Around the World Race. Her story and that of her crew is told in the documentary 'Maiden.'

Dr. Paul Volberding and nurse Cliff Morrison were on the frontlines of the AIDS epidemic treating patients in the early 1980s before anyone understood what the disease was, or how it was spread. They are now featured in the new documentary '5B'.

The Toy Story movies are about the secret lives of dolls and action figures that find their deepest fulfillment in a child's embrace. But they're really about what it means to be human: the joys of love and friendship and the pains of rejection and loss. But even more than the earlier films, Toy Story 4 feels haunted by the idea of impermanence. What happens when we outgrow something we once cherished? To put it another way: After three Toy Story movies, do we really need a fourth?

Jimmie Fails plays a man who continues to visit the old Victorian house he grew up in — even though his family no longer owns it — in this comic fable about the toll of gentrification.

Emma Thompson stars as a talk show host who hires Molly (Mindy Kaling) to join a writers room full of white men. But the film falls short in reconciling its satire with its more sentimental moments.

The first time we see Elton John in Rocketman, he's wearing a spangly red devil costume with sharp horns and enormous wings. It's one of the many glorious, glittery things we see him wear in the movie, although on this occasion, he isn't dressed for a concert. It's around 1990, and Elton, played by Taron Egerton, is attending a group therapy session. He may be one of the world's most successful rock stars, but he's also being eaten alive by sex addiction and substance abuse, and also by feelings of abandonment that go back to his childhood.

Olivia Wilde's lighthearted, female-centric film charts the adventures of two brainy best friends who embark on a quest to reframe their high school identities 24 hours before graduation.

Joanna Hogg's movie, which centers on a young film student, is the first of a projected two-part drama drawing from Hogg's life. It won the top prize in Sundance's world cinema dramatic competition.

John Waters reflects on his morbid fascinations as a boy, and what it's like to be an aging rebel. He has a new memoir.

Writer-director Olivier Assayas has a knack for turning abstract ideas into stimulating cinema — which is exactly what he does in Non-Fiction, a modern-day talkfest centering on the Parisian elite.

Dan Pritzker's new film tells the story of Charles "Buddy" Bolden, a mythic jazz hero who burned so bright he burned himself out. Though striking and stylish, Bolden loses its grip in the final act.