Glenn McDonald

Suffragette ★★★★ Now playing Those expecting a proper period piece will be sorely disappointed by Suffragette, a restless and angry drama that sometimes plays out like a violent political thriller. The film is set in London, eight years before the 19th Amendment was ratified in the U.S., at the moment when the women’s suffrage movement […]

The Martian ★★★ ½ Now playing With its earnest discussions of orbital velocities and hexadecimal alphabets, director Ridley Scott’s The Martian is one nerdy-ass science fiction movie—in a good way. Matt Damon headlines as astronaut Mark Watney, a biologist on the Ares III manned mission to Mars. In a recognizable near future, NASA is properly […]

Everest ★★★Opening Friday There are movies you want to see on the big screen if you’re going to see them at all. Big spectacle movies just don’t scale down that well to the screens and speakers of your living-room TV, computer screen or—god help us—mobile device. Everest is just that kind of movie. Based on […]

The Visit★★★ Now playing Fairly or not, when you go into an M. Night Shyamalan movie, you expect a twist. The director made his bones in Hollywood with 1999’s The Sixth Sense, which features one of the most cleverly obscured script flips in the history of scary movies. Shyamalan’s plot-twist movies since then have usually […]

A Walk in the Woods★ ½ Now playing Travel writer Bill Bryson is bored. Semi-retired in a stately New England homestead, he longs for one more grand adventure. Bryson (Robert Redford) stumbles upon his chance when he takes a stroll and discovers that the Appalachian Trail runs right through his neighborhood. Inspired, he decides to […]

Southpaw★★ ½ Now playing Costarring Jake Gyllenhaal and his torso, Southpaw is a technically competent but largely uninteresting boxing movie with the soapiest script this side of the daytime Emmys. The movie’s main appeal is watching Gyllenhaal muscle his way through it with a powerful physical performance. Directed by Antoine Fuqua (Training Day), Southpaw chronicles […]

Trainwreck ★★Now playing Trainwreck, the much-anticipated collaboration between director Judd Apatow and writer/star Amy Schumer, is a new twist on an old scam. It’s a bait-and-switch in which the viewer is promised one kind of film in the marketing blitz and then finds an inferior product in the theater. Schumer plays a version of her […]