A fictionalized meeting that is very funny at times and boasts actors fully committed to communicating the bizarreness of a particular time and place in American history.

The biopic checks off all the major highlights of country singer/songwriter Hank Williams’s life—to a point.

Meryl Streep has recently undertaken to play Florence Foster Jenkins in a film by Stephen Frears that will come out later this year. French writer/director Xavier Giannoli, though, has beaten that production to the punch with his deluxe variation of Jenkins’s biography.

“What does N.W.A. stand for, huh? No whites allowed?” So asks Jerry Heller (Paul Giamatti), as he sets out to manage what would become one of the most important hip-hop acts of all time: Niggaz Wit Attitudes. N.W.A. was a supergroup in reverse, with many of its members becoming solo stars after it broke up. […]

Onstage, Janis Joplin wailed the blues, drank whiskey, and drove the crowds wild. Offstage, she drank whiskey, slept around, and died shooting smack in 1971. But Joplin believed in music, worshipped it, seized its power to communicate and transport. Her love of music was the purest thing in her life, and Janis: Little Girl Blue […]

Steve Jobs, the movie, is more admirable as a meticulously constructed piece of theater that uses real-life figures like billiard balls than for its emotional catharsis or insight into the evolution of a man many perceived as a larger-than-life genius. At the New York Film Festival press conference, scriptwriter Aaron Sorkin insisted he did not […]

One challenge at the Toronto International Film Festival is having enough time to check out films and directors that you may not know, in search of a gem that you (and thousands of others) can discover and claim as your own. Fortunately, a handful of shot-in-the-dark experiences were among the most memorable this year. A […]

Writer, producer, and director Michael Almereyda is one of the more exciting filmmakers working today. He is interested in serious, intellectual themes, adapting Shakespeare in Cymbeline earlier this year or dramatizing the life and work of famed social scientist Stanley Milgram in his latest film, Experimenter. Yet Almereyda is not so much paying homage to […]

Pawn Sacrifice is a love story unlike any other, as it is a love between a man, chess genius Bobby Fischer (Tobey Maguire), and silence. Chess played at the grandmaster level requires stretching the human mind to its outermost limits, as matches have to be exhaustively prepared for, and there are more potential moves and […]