Michael Phillips

Some documentaries unite, rather than divide, and become box office champions as a result. The most conspicuous example this summer is the lovely Fred Rogers tribute “Won’t You Be My...

Two key dates in the annals of Winnie the Pooh: Dec. 24, 1925: A.A. Milne publishes a front-page children’s story in the London Evening News, changing the name of his...

In the annals of vicious black comedies whose theme is failing upward, “The Captain” is surely among the most chilling and improbably fact-based. Writer-director Robert Schwentke’s German-language picture, acquired for...

“The Spy Who Dumped Me” gets by, barely, thanks mainly to Kate McKinnon. Her crazily fluid and unpredictable comic timing, and her willingness to go big — well past Madeline...

Two times out of three, this is what performers do for a living: Come up with something juicy and alive, working with material composited from cardboard and good intentions. Often...

At one sublime moment in the new music documentary “Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda,” we find the Oscar-winning film composer in his Manhattan apartment. It’s raining outside. Sakamoto, forever on the hunt...

Plaintive but ever on the move, following its bike messenger protagonist through a hectic and potentially life-changing week, writer-director Jim McKay’s “En el Septimo Dia” (“On the Seventh Day”) opens...

Fans of the Fighting Irish have to wait a few more weeks to watch their team in opening game battle against Michigan. Meantime, always and forever — and even if...

The terrorists’ manifesto in the spiffy new “Mission: Impossible — Fallout” hinges its action plan for global slaughter on the phrase “the greater the suffering, the greater the peace.” So...