Film

'Brittany Runs a Marathon' is the first film written and directed by playwright Paul Downs Colaizzo and it stars Jillian Bell as a hard-partying woman who signs up for the New York City Marathon. Justin Chang reviews it.

Film critic Justin Chang reviews the new film by director Richard Linklater, starring Cate Blanchette.

I'm not sure that any creature is more marvelous than the honeybee, with its highly evolved social organization, its ability to create honey, and, of course, the stinger that causes us to take heed whenever we hear buzzing. The pain it threatens makes it easy to think you need an almost-monastic devotion to become a beekeeper.

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.