There’s something perfect about Greta Gerwig adapting "Little Women." Louisa May Alcott’s semi-autobiographical ode to sisterly love, competition, creativity and lofty self-sacrifice could have been written as vehicle for Gerwig to star in, its rambunctious spirit utterly of a piece with her penchant for unpredictability and barely contained physicality.

To all appearances, the animated comedy "Spies in Disguise" is just another a rollicking sendup of superspy thrillers. As befits a movie about clandestine activity, however, there’s more than meets the eye here. Hidden beneath its parodistic action-comedy exterior is a message, one that doesn’t set out to merely lampoon the genre but to playfully question almost everything about it.

Writer/director J.J. Abrams delighted a lot of "Star Wars" fans with his freshening up of the series in 2015, kicking off a trilogy of sequels to the original three films with "Episode VII - The Force Awakens." The film brought new life to "Star Wars," rinsing out the dour taste of "The Prequels" with new heroes and new baddies to boot. After Rian Johnson’s second installment, "The Last Jedi," Abrams returns now, with co-writer Chris Terrio, for "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker," to close out the series of nine films that started over four decades ago. What a shame then, that it all goes out with a fizzle rather than a bang.

Millions of Fortnite players had a bad feeling about a historic Star Wars event inside the game, just minutes before it went live.

If even just for a moment, Kevin Conroy was the Batman in front of the camera instead of just the voice.

In 2017, director Jake Kasdan rebooted the ’90s family adventure film "Jumanji" by plunking John Hughes-style teen characters into a wilderness-set video game. "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle" was a critical and commercial success, anchored by the charms of megastars Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Karen Gillan and Jack Black, and the unique pleasure of watching them all play against type. Kasdan and company (including co-writers Jeff Pinkner and Scott Rosenberg) know a good formula when they see it. So the sequel, "Jumanji: The Next Level," simply offers more and more of it: There’s more jaw-droppingly crazy video game high jinks, and especially, more stars playing personas vastly different from theirs.

Sometime soon, there will be a class, book or dissertation parsing the era of late period Clint Eastwood, his cinematic fixation in the latter half of the 2010s on ripped-from-the-headlines white male American exceptionalism. The notoriously speedy auteur, now 89, has churned out these films every two years starting in 2014, with the smash hit "American Sniper." He’s taken on the "Miracle on the Hudson" with 2016’s "Sully," and experimented with nonprofessional actors in the ghastly "The 15:17 to Paris," about American tourists thwarting a terrorist attack on a train to France. Eastwood himself starred in "The Mule" as an elderly man who gets himself into interstate drug transportation.

Adam Sandler was waiting to be thrown into a midtown fountain on Sixth Avenue for a scene in Josh and Benny Safdie's "Uncut Gems" when he noticed a familiar face on the sidewalk.

The biggest surprise from this year’s Golden Globe nominations is the lack of surprises. As expected, Netflix continued encroaching on awards season in both the movie and television categories, earning 17 each, or 34 nominations across the board. The streaming platform’s dominance also signaled the slight slipping of HBO’s powerful hold on television: The network earned 15 nods, trailing Netflix’s TV nominations by two.

The descriptor "visionary" is thrown around a lot these days for film directors, and it’s often a bit of a reach. But for filmmaker Melina Matsoukas, the veteran music video director behind many of Rihanna and Lady Gaga’s most memorable clips as well as Beyonce’s "Formation" and "Lemonade," "visionary" seems the only word apt enough to describe her searing directorial debut, the unique and unabashed "Queen & Slim." It’s a film that comes roaring out of the gate, Matsoukas firmly planting her flag as a filmmaker with audacity and originality.

Ana de Armas is looking for a place to call home. “I’ve been in L.A. for six years,” she says, lounging in a Beverly Hills hotel to talk about her latest film, writer-director Rian Johnson’s spry whodunit “Knives Out.” “But I’m in an in-between moment of deciding where I want to go next. I’ve been working so much that I miss my family — I might want to spend more time in Cuba, or maybe move to New York and try a different kind of city with another energy and vibe. But right now, I’m neither in L.A. or New York because I’m working in New Orleans.”

Daniel Craig delivers a slab of Smithfield-sized ham in "Knives Out," a cheekily playful updating of Agatha Christie by way of Trump-era politics.

A long time ago, in a galaxy online called eBay, an early script for “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” went up for sale thanks to one actor’s thoughtless actions.

Tom Hanks has never played a superhero. But when the actor recently donned a very simple cardigan sweater, and the slacks to go with it, he felt like one.

The movie "21 Bridges" opens with a bang. Not literally - it’s just a close-up of a 13-year-old boy’s tear-streaked face, as he listens to the off-camera sermon delivered at his father’s funeral. We learn that Dad, a New York City cop, has been killed in the line of duty, but not before he "punished" three of the four criminals he was pursuing.

Disney’s 2013 animated "Frozen," inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s "The Snow Queen," wasn’t just a hit. It was a cultural tidal wave, a ubiquitous phenomenon thanks to Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez’s soaring songs, particularly the inescapable, Oscar-winning "Let It Go," belted by Broadway powerhouse Idina Menzel. Six years later, the Elsa Halloween costumes have yet to grow cold. So when it comes to a sequel, the only mandate is: "Don’t muck it up."

Freshman-class recording artists Lizzo, Billie Eilish and Lil Nas X collectively landed 20 Grammy Award nominations for 2020 on Wednesday, as the Recording Academy, which determines nominees and, ultimately, award recipients, wholeheartedly embraced the music industry’s newest faces and sounds.

American troops who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan relied on interpreters to understand the threats around them and help them to communicate with locals.

Roles for older actors can fall into some predictable tropes, but Helen Mirren and Ian McKellen say their new film, “The Good Liar,” let them brush aside cliches and even their characters’ mortality for a good cat-and-mouse thriller.

France’s legendary Le Mans race, the central contest depicted in James Mangold’s “Ford v Ferrari,” runs more than 3,000 miles over the course of 24 hours. But that’s nothing compared to the distance Christian Bale had to cover coming off playing Dick Cheney in “Vice.”

Special to The Washington Post

For all its nostalgic charm, the “Charlie’s Angels” brand -- born as a TV series in the 1970s, then followed by a hit 2000 movie, an underperforming sequel and a short-lived ABC series - was hardly crying out for a reboot.

The film, a sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s "The Shining," opens with a series of short curtain raisers, including a flashback to the Colorado setting of that 1980 horror classic, with a small boy riding a plastic tricycle through the mountain inn’s iconically carpeted hallways. Inspired as much by Kubrick’s revisionist film as by either of Stephen King’s books -- 1977’s "The Shining" and its sequel, 2013’s "Doctor Sleep" -- this new story by horror wunderkind Mike Flanagan ("The Haunting of Hill House") returns to the Overlook in ways both literal and figurative.

Paul Feig’s “Last Christmas” looks every bit like your standard holiday romantic-comedy, but it has some surprises under its gauzy wrapping. For one thing, it’s the first — and likely the last — Brexit Christmas movie.

"Playing with Fire" is a family comedy about wildland firefighters, or "smokejumpers," who gain a little levity in their lives thanks to a trio of mischievous kids. Directed by Andy Fickman and written by Dan Ewen and Matt Lieberman, the movie shoots for slapstick but lands squarely in the surreal.

Director Mike Flanagan is no stranger to adapting Stephen King’s more difficult works. After all, his adaptation of "Gerald’s Game," a story long considered to be unfilmable, was positively received in 2017.

When reviewing a sequel in any long-running franchise -- especially one with as much time travel as the "Terminator" movies, which have always trafficked in alternate futures and pasts -- there’s a temptation, if not an absolute need, to include a brief recapitulation of where things stand before getting started. And with "Terminator: Dark Fate," the satisfyingly solid sixth installment in the sci-fi series about various Terminators (i.e., cyborg super-assassins from the future), that’s certainly true.

Jonathan Lethem’s novel about a private eye with Tourette’s syndrome, “Motherless Brooklyn,” starts with a brilliant burst of uncontrolled profanity and an explanation of its protagonist’s condition.

British actress Cynthia Erivo is relatively small in stature. In person, she is earnest and genial. In performance, the 32-year-old can appear achingly vulnerable. And if you’re not paying attention, she will bowl you over. Even if you are, she probably will, anyway.

It seems like director Deon Taylor might be the only filmmaker actively keeping the mid-budget adult thriller alive in this age of extinction. Plus, he’s prolific: His topical corrupt cop drama “Black and Blue” is his second 2019 film, arriving just a few months after his surprisingly entertaining and campy home invasion horror thriller “The Intruder.”

“Fargo” and “Legion” auteur Noah Hawley shoots for the stars in his daring leap from the small screen to the big with his uniquely existential “Lucy in the Sky.” It’s a loose adaptation of the bizarre 2007 incident involving Lisa Nowak, an astronaut who was charged with attempted kidnapping after driving from Houston to Orlando to confront the Air Force captain she believed to be involved with her lover, another astronaut. But rather than trafficking in tawdry true crime, Hawley and co-writers Brian C. Brown and Elliott DiGuiseppi use the story to explore the thematic potential of what it means to return to life on Earth after experiencing space, from a point of view of a complex, challenging woman.

For years, people have wondered why 2009’s smash zom-com "Zombieland" never had a sequel. Ruben Fleischer’s feature directorial debut put him on the map and firmly established the postmodern zombie craze as a pop phenomenon that shows no signs of stopping.

Once upon a time, a Hollywood movie didn’t have to be so many things to so many people. It didn’t have to set a new opening-weekend record, conquer multiple demographics or plant the seeds of a future franchise to be deemed a reasonable success. But times have changed and reasonable has long gone out the window. Witness the bigger-is-better aesthetic that informs even a relatively minor cultural happening like "Maleficent: Mistress of Evil," Disney’s follow-up to its 2014 hit "Maleficent," which was itself a live-action spin on the studio’s sublime 1959 animation, "Sleeping Beauty."

After years of buildup, Apple will make its long-awaited push into original programming with the Nov. 1 launch of its streaming service, Apple TV+. Its most anticipated series, "The Morning Show," starring Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon, might as well have been created in a streaming TV lab -- with one exception. Viewers eager to consume the show will have to pace themselves: Apple TV+ will make three episodes of the series available immediately, but the remaining seven will be released weekly.

The enduring appeal of "The Addams Family" is quite impressive. With only four notes and a couple of snaps, plus a classic black dress, one can instantly evoke the classic American Gothic clan, who are creepy, kooky, mysterious and spooky.

Legendary director Ang Lee first dipped his toe into the world of high frame rate cinema with 2016’s "Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk," which was shot and shown in select theaters at 120 frames per second (as opposed the usual 24). Lee and executives hoped critics and audiences might give the new look a chance, but the bizarre adaptation of the best-selling novel wasn’t the hit that allowed the format to break through to the mainstream. Perhaps they just needed a real movie star to sell it. So for his next trick, Lee has put not one, but two Will Smiths in an action movie, "Gemini Man." Too bad everyone involved forgot about the part that actually makes you care: the script.

Kevin Smith was about to go in for heart surgery in early 2018 when his doctor informed him the odds were high he would not survive because he had what doctors call a "widowmaker heart attack." Despite assurances by the man who was about to perform the operation that all would go well, Smith began to reflect on his life.

Ruby Rose knows it’s a big deal that Batwoman is gay. She’s read the comics and has seen the clickbait headlines. But she also wants you to know there’s more to her new character than just her dating life.

With the amount of controversy surrounding it, "Joker" feels more like an idea and less like an actual movie. Could it possibly stand up to the mythology that has sprung up around it, stoked by breathless film festival hype, pre-emptive misanthropic adoration, gun control activists demanding action and some foot-in-mouth interviews by writer/director Todd Phillips? It absolutely does not live up to its undeserved hype, for better or for worse. And while that may be surprising, it also has to be expected. So what exactly is "Joker"? It’s a great trailer.

Where have you gone, Eddie Murphy? Our nation turns its cheerless eyes to you. Really. I know, Murphy didn’t actually go anywhere, but given the two decades since he’s made one of the trademark R-rated comedies that are his strength, it seems like he did. Thankfully, Murphy is back, and both his old gifts and some new ones are on engaging display in the rowdy, raunchy, inescapably funny "Dolemite Is My Name," a gleefully profane biopic and a passion project the star has been nurturing for years.

As cliched as it sounds, there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel. But if a wheel can’t be improved on, it can be made lovelier. That’s what "Abominable" does. The animated film takes a standard story and adds so much visual beauty that it exceeds expectations.

Sandra Diaz-Twine will join "Boston" Rob Mariano as a mentor for "Survivor: Island of the Idols."

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ first novel, “The Water Dancer,” has been a long and eventful journey. Begun a decade ago, his chronicle of a slave with an extraordinary memory who joins the Underground Railroad is the result of countless drafts, a shift from multiple narrators to a single voice, some needed advice from fellow writers and hundreds of thousands of words discarded. Coates’ research ranged from reading interviews with ex-slaves and consulting a 19th-century Farmer’s Almanac — books duly pictured on his Instagram account — to his numerous and revelatory visits to former plantations. And then came that call from Oprah Winfrey.

A look comes over Brad Pitt when he listens to James Gray that can only be described in one word: tickled. And a little awed. Recently, the actor and director visited Washington, D.C., to premiere "Ad Astra," a science-fiction drama in which Pitt plays an astronaut sent to Neptune to retrieve his father, who has been presumed dead. Gray conceived his idea in 2011 but it lay dormant until Pitt agreed to produce it in 2016; the film, both agree, changed profoundly in the ensuing years, becoming as much a meditation on middle-aged regret as a speculative glimpse into a space-age future.

Once feared shuttered for good, "Downton Abbey" has grandly reopened its doors, and for those who found pleasure within its magisterial walls, that is the best of news. For six seasons a pillar of appointment TV, in fact PBS’ highest-rated dramatic series of all time, "Downton" has adroitly transitioned to theaters with all its satisfying qualities -- and just about its entire core cast -- intact.

The group competed in Wednesday's live, two-hour results show, where they performed "Some Gave All" with Billy Ray Cyrus.

It’s that time of year I always look forward to: leaves crunching on the sidewalk, sweater weather, shadowy evenings and -- just maybe -- a glut of good movies at the multiplexes. Here are some of the most anticipated titles coming up this season, sorted by categories; please note that all release dates are tentative and as changeable as Mister Rogers’ cardigans.

"Hustlers" opens with a long Steadicam shot following new girl Destiny (Constance Wu) as she strolls into her own destiny, winding her way from the warm womb of a strip club dressing room, onto the club floor. With this visual nod, director Lorene Scafaria asserts just what her film is, and what it’s about. It’s not just "the J. Lo stripper movie," although it is that, and how.

Donna Tartt’s Pulizter Prize-winning tome "The Goldfinch" was a blockbuster bestseller and the toast of book clubs in 2013. The film adaptation should have been slam dunk, with director John Crowley, fresh off the acclaimed "Brooklyn," legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins, and screenwriter Peter Straughan adapting Tartt’s novel. And yet, the movie is simpering and dull, devoid of tension, an overwrought and uninvolving film that is both a personal drama and a crime mystery, but also neither of those things, and nearly, nothing at all.

It can be a cheesy thing when a novel is split up and spread out over a handful of films, but Stephen King’s “It” is not one of those books.

TV review

See how we sift and scroll through these endless TV menus and grids, scoffing at what the algorithms recommend, defaulting yet again to old sitcom reruns and an episode of "Beachfront Bargain Hunt" that we’re never quite sure if we’ve seen before. In theory we want to be swept up in something new, but we’re sometimes not very good about trying new things. Sometimes the biggest challenge is a genre bias -- to watch a show that looks unbearably hokey. Too elfy, too childish, too derivative.

David Oyelowo is a writer, director (he’s in the middle of shooting a film called “The Water Man” now), actor and producer. The classically trained British actor -- a couple of years ago, he was in an off-Broadway production of “Othello,” opposite James Bond, aka Daniel Craig, as Iago -- has five other projects in pre- or post-production, as well as a lot of voiceover work for television and more on his resume. Point is, the guy is busy, but he knows how to keep his proverbial ducks in a row.

We all agree that in writing about new films, spoilers should be kept to a minimum, right? But what about movies that are decades old — classics, whose stories are embedded in popular culture? Is there a statute of limitations on when it is not OK to openly discuss a film's secrets?

There is a certain mindless pleasure in the “Fallen” movies. Watching Gerard Butler muscle his way through increasingly preposterous obstacles as a Secret Service agent can be amusing and oddly transfixing at the same time. It’s mass entertainment that makes a courtesy stop in theaters before ascending to its true calling: Endless cable reruns. But whatever this franchise got away with in “Olympus Has Fallen” and “London Has Fallen,” it’s clear that the well has run dry on this idea and character.

The Boss meets Bollywood, and if those potent entities resonate with you, you know that combination is not to be missed. If you don’t know, you’re going to find out as "Blinded by the Light," a high-spirited film with enough potential for pleasure to get picked up at Sundance by a major like Warners, goes into wide release.

Much has been made of how "Good Boys" -- an R-rated comedy about a trio of sixth-grade nerds caught up in a misadventure involving drugs, sex toys, beer and slapstick mishaps -- looks like a junior varsity version of "Superbad," or, to cite a more recent precedent, "Booksmart," but with 12-year-old boys. Those comparisons are fair, and fairly accurate. The comedy, produced by "Superbad’s" writer/producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, hits all the expected marks for raunch and vulgarity, with the bonus that it is actually also kind of sweet.

Actress Isabela Moner says she didn’t expect so much action when she signed up for “Dora and the Lost City of Gold,” the upcoming film about the adventurous Latina explorer. Moner said she thought it would be a funny film, with Dora in a “fish out of water” kind of situation as she starts high school.

It’s two-thirds of the way through "The Kitchen" before anyone asks Kathy Brennan (Melissa McCarthy) what, exactly, she wants. It’s her son, at the dinner table. We’ve seen Kathy struggle and scrape by to survive, utterly sick of depending on and thanking men for her existence. We’ve seen her turn to a life of crime, wresting away control of the Irish mob in late ’70s Hell’s Kitchen while her husband is away in prison. We’ve seen her flourish in the brutal and bloody collections and protections "business" she builds with two other mob wives, the abused, broken Claire (Elisabeth Moss) and Ruby (Tiffany Haddish), a black woman, an outsider. But what does she really want?

"Sometimes I hate who I am." In most movies, an expression of such existential angst is to be expected from the lips of a troubled teen -- or a conflicted killer. But in the overheated (yet undercooked) melodrama "The Art of Racing in the Rain," those thoughts belong to a dog, voiced by Kevin Costner, who articulates the frustration that his character can’t communicate with the struggling racecar driver (Milo Ventimiglia) who owns him.

Like most attempts at wrangling old friends for a gathering, this one started with a group text. But those can become a graveyard of noncommitments, so to persuade their former “Beverly Hills, 90210” costars to reunite on the small screen, Tori Spelling and Jennie Garth (aka Donna Martin and Kelly Taylor) opted for a more personalized touch: They made gift bags.

The clock is ticking for two soldiers who have to stop an attack in the trailer for "1917," which is scheduled to be released in December.

It’s pretty incredible how the humble beginnings of 2001’s "The Fast and the Furious," a twist on "Point Break" with muscle cars instead of surfboards, have now spawned a nine-film franchise. And the souped-up series shows no signs of slowing down. This summer, star Vin Diesel has tossed the keys to his action superstar costars, Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham, for their very own spinoff, the cumbersomely titled "Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw."

Lil Nas X has taken his horse to the old town road and ridden it to the top of the Billboard charts for 16 weeks, tying a record set by Mariah Carey and Luis Fonsi.

If there was any doubt that the 2019 box office belonged to the Walt Disney Co., this weekend put an end to it. Not only did its photorealistic remake of “The Lion King” devour opening weekend records for the month of July and PG-rated films, but “Avengers: Endgame” also crept past “Avatar” to become the highest-grossing film of all time.

Tom Cruise, who plays the title character, surprised audiences at Comic-Con in San Diego, Calif., with the trailer Thursday.

"The Lion King" is the latest victim in the Disney remake parade, in which director Jon Favreau dons his best Dr. Moreau cosplay and imagines a "Planet Earth" where animals spout Shakespearean soliloquies. The result of this horrific experiment, combining photorealistic animal simulations with celebrity voices, is a bizarre Frankenstein’s monster of a film that is so distressingly unpleasant it somehow manages to even ruin the original, much beloved 1994 hand-drawn cartoon version.

Kumail Nanjiani has enlivened everything from jeans commercials to Oscar clip packages, so it’s no surprise that in "Stuber," he’s able to perk up a buddy comedy that follows the "Lethal Weapon"/"Rush Hour" template so slavishly that it could be titled "Lethal Hour" or "Weapon Rush" or "Lethal Rush." You get the idea.

With "Spider-Man: Far From Home" now in theaters, it’s time to revisit our ranking of the now eight -- and counting -- Spider-Man films. "Far From Home" swings into our best three Spidey-flicks of all-time, but does it make its way to the top? Or does an animated Miles Morales put up a fight?

Your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man has a new spring in his step. After the critical and commercial success of Sony’s third character reboot in Jon Watts’ "Spider-Man: Homecoming" and the hallucinatory multiverse adventure of the animated "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse," things are looking pretty good for ol’ Spidey.

It’s a notion that would leave Beatles fans Here, There and Everywhere crying out for Help! A world without the transcendent songs of Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr seems almost impossible to imagine nearly six decades after the Fab Four changed music forever. But that’s the concept explored in "Yesterday," a new movie where everybody except one man forgets about The Beatles.

In a summer of sequels, third and fourth films in a series have to prove the worthiness of their existence, and some this season haven’t risen to the top. But while it’s easy to scoff at another killer doll film in The Conjuring Universe, the spooky franchise is stealthily successful, and always steadily consistent. "Annabelle Comes Home," the third "Annabelle" film, which marks the directorial debut of writer Gary Dauberman, could actually be the best in the trilogy.

It’s easy to question the necessity of another "Toy Story" movie, especially after the emotionally devastating "Toy Story 3." Arriving nine years later, "Toy Story 4" has to earn its relevance. It does so in spades, with astonishingly beautiful animation, smart humor and a story filled with the kind of pathos and poignancy we expect.

Aubrey Plaza was haunted by Chucky long before she ever toyed with joining the new "Child's Play" movie. The slasher film series about an evil killer doll left an impression on the actress at a young age, and now she's at the center of the franchise's latest flick -- a modernized retelling of the 1988 original in which Chucky is now a high-tech robot who learns from humans rather than a toy possessed by an evil spirit.

Commentary

As musical epithets go, it’s hard to say whether "dad rock" is more insulting to the dads or the rock. It’s a term that’s been flung at everyone from Pavement to the Eagles, and it’s most often used to describe a multigenerational swath of rock ’n’ roll that no longer feels angry enough at the world to want to change it. Or if not that, maybe it’s just mature rock music made by and for chill, white dads.

When he took up the mantle of Harlem detective John Shaft for the 2000 action reboot "Shaft," Samuel L. Jackson knew his character, John Shaft II, would need a persona of his own.

Kumail Nanjiani is the best thing about "Men in Black: International." That’s saying something, considering that the actor never appears on camera and that the character he lends his expressively plaintive voice to is a CGI alien the size of a gerbil.

"Dark Phoenix" isn’t kidding about the "dark" part. The latest, and probably final, chapter in the X-Men superhero saga is a somber, even funereal affair -- not in a stylish, Christopher Nolan-esque way, or even a la "Logan," the deliciously cynical comic-book-noir contribution to the mutant canon from 2017.

The key to the appeal of "The Secret Life of Pets" is the filmmakers understand the lovable quirks and characteristics that make our furry friends who they are. In the sequel to the animated hit, "The Secret Life of Pets 2," it’s more of the same, but with babies and toddlers thrown into the mix. If you’ve seen the first movie, you get it.