Earlier this spring, when I saw the trailer for _The Sheep Detectives_ , I had what I have come to understand is a universal experience. When I watched Hugh Jackman, a kindly shepherd named George, read murder mysteries to his impressively realistic animated flock of sheep, I found this premise odd but charming. When I learned that George was murdered, his flock suddenly tasked with solving the…

_Michael_ is a bad movie. Let’s just get that out of the way now. It is a movie designed less to tell a story than to recreate moments, ones you are probably already familiar with. It is a movie designed to give you a karaoke experience in a theater setting with other like-minded Michael Jackson fans. It is a movie designed to make the estate of a dead pop star a great deal of money, in line with…

Pixar has always been investing in protecting the Earth, at least in its movies. _A Bug's Life_ illuminated the role of insects in an ecosystem, _Finding Nemo_ called attention to marine pollution and coral reefs, and _WALL-E_ , the most radical of them all, imagined a planet destroyed by corporate greed and rapacious consumption. These films all concerned a non-human protagonist leaving home and…

The greatest betrayal of my life was when my little sister texted the group chat a screenshot of the movie _Goat_ with a demand to "clear your calendars," and over my protests, my older sister agreed, saying that she was "actually dying to see this movie." The screenshot my little sister provided declared that ANDRE IGUODALA IS IGGY THE REF, a zebra, which was burying the lede. As it turned out,…

On the biggest night in movies, there are two ways to win: Your years of craft and toil can be rewarded with a beautiful golden statue that names you one of the best of the best in your industry; or you can look really, really good on the red carpet. This year, the big winner of the red carpet was the brooch. I would say that these are not your grandmother's brooches, but they quite literally are…

There are two surefire ways to win an Oscar as a great director. One is to make a movie that crowns you the undisputed king of Hollywood, conquering the box office and the critics alike—in other words, the Christopher Nolan way. The other is to put in so much strong, critically acclaimed work for so long that eventually, usually 10 or more years after your true prime, the Academy will reward you…

"My sister Emily loved the moors," wrote Charlotte Brontë, in the introduction to a selection of Emily's poems published in 1850. Emily had died in 1848, and had not lived to see the publication of the second edition of _Wuthering Heights_ , carefully revised by her older sister. "Flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in the blackest of the heath for her; out of sullen hollow in livid hillside…