By Stephanie Zacharek

It's not giving too much away to say that Tashi is both the wedge that’s driven these two men apart (played by Mike Faist and Josh O'Connor) and the magnetic force that unites them spiritually—maybe even physically. It’s a bummer, then, that—save one magnificent scene—Zendaya’s performance is the weakest in the movie. As the adult Tashi, a fierce competitor who takes her husband’s wins and losses so personally they may as well be her own, she strides…

By Stephanie Zacharek

At Sundance, where the film premiered, audience members reportedly walked out in sizable numbers, turned off by the film’s myriad gross-outs. But the real problem with Sasquatch Sunset is that it’s distancing, in an art-project way. The movie is just too coy, too overt in the way it signals when we’re supposed to be appalled and when we’re supposed to be moved; it advertises its weirdness even as it strives to convince us how much these Sasquatch…

By Stephanie Zacharek

The country we call the United States is dangerously fractured right now, and anyone who denies it has their head in the sand. That should make Alex Garland’s Civil War the perfect movie for our times. Instead, it’s just the most obvious one. Set in a country torn to ribbons, Garland’s movie is calculated to be powerful, chilling, alarmingly prescient—you can almost see the advertising pull quotes writing themselves. But there’s a difference between a movie with…

By Stephanie Zacharek

There’s no room for nuance in Wicked Little Letters, but there is plenty of spicy, explicit language; the writer of these invective-filled missives certainly did not hold back. Yet the movie seems to have been designed for people who have never used, let alone heard, curse words before—the score includes lots of jaunty little melodic cues to let us know that we’re supposed to laugh in shock at such wickedness, not disapprove of it. With all that…

By Stephanie Zacharek

Instead of twisting the storyline to try to make a point about, say, the church’s stance on abortion, Mohan and Lobel treat the institution’s misogyny as a given. That gives them the freedom to spend the movie’s fleet runtime riffing on classic Catholic miracle stuff (a nun seemingly graced with the gift of stigmata proudly shows off her seeping palm) and showcasing Sweeney’s Easter lily freshness. She’s also a producer on the film, and this role—that of…

By Stephanie Zacharek

Lohan could probably deliver more than Irish Wish asks of her. In some ways, with her quizzically alert eyes and not-so-naïve smile, she looks too emotionally mature, too reasonable, to play a nearing-middle-aged woman swooning over an obvious semi-loser. (Paul, it turns out, isn’t really a bad guy, just opportunistic, self-centered, and clueless.) But there’s something both appealing and touching about this performance, even though it’s nothing close to a tour de force. Its casualness is what…

By Stephanie Zacharek

It’s become a given that nearly any movie comedy, drama, or 1960s oddity—Little Shop of Horrors, The Color Purple, Legally Blonde—can be turned into a hit musical. From there, it’s logical to turn those musicals into movies of their own; at the very least, it’s a way to revive older material for new audiences. But there’s something to be said for knowing when to leave well enough alone. The movie musical version of Mean Girls—written, like the…