Your ultimate guide to Bangkok

A stellar injustice: Hollywood has made a movie about a faked Mars landing—1977’s deliriously silly Capricorn One—but has never given the historic first moon landing its due. That’s not so hard to explain. While inspiring on a global scale, the 1969 accomplishment was pretty straightforward, dramatically speaking. Cool competence ruled the day and made it happen. The real thing was better than any film could be. Thrilling when it escapes the gravity of drab living rooms and offices, First Man does an admirable job of complexifying a well-told tale. It presents Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling, suitably square) as a guy who, in 1961, was both puncturing the barriers of human knowledge by flying experimental planes 140,000 feet over the Mojave Desert, as well as someone who was banging his head against the finite limits of a medical science that couldn’t save his daughter from a malignant brain tumor. Faced with that pain, Armstrong (if we’re to believe Josh Singer’s script, sourced from James R. Hansen’s authorized 2005 biography) did what many military men of the ’50s and ’60s did: shut off emotionally and turn inward. First Man makes Gosling colder than he was in Blade Runner 2049 as a replicant, itself a NASA-level achievement. Claire Foy, already stranded in one of those underwritten astronaut-wife roles, has so little to work with from Gosling, her big meltdown scene takes on a desperate grandeur. But you come to appreciate Gosling’s reserve, his shirt-and-tie starchiness

A mercurial and explosive film, Blindspotting nimbly parses conflicts about race, rent, incarceration and gentrification. The film is set in bustling and bristling Oakland—a landscape that churns with spoken word as well as tensions between long-time residents and gentrifying tech hipsters. The protagonists are played by its eloquent screenwriters, Daveed Diggs (of Hamilton and Black-ish fame) and Rafael Casal. They portray Oakland natives who work at a removals company. Miles (Casal) is loyal to his friends and territorial to a fault; despite the moderating influence of his wife (played with memorable conviction by Jasmine Cephas Jones, Diggs’s Hamilton co-star), Miles’s hair-trigger fury is often ignited by instances of hipster encroachment. Soft-spoken parolee Collin (Diggs) dodges violence and tries to mitigate the chaotic leanings of his best friend. But early in the film, Collin witnesses a terrifying incident that threatens his post-incarceration plans. Blindspotting is a remarkably suspenseful film. Scenes swerve from hilarity to high tension, but the suspense is in service to a conscientious goal. Gun-filled sequences—despite set-ups worthy of Scorsese, Park Chan-wook or Antoine Fuqua—don’t often culminate in the expected bloodshed. It’s not perfect, and some of its mundane conversational episodes fall flat. But for the most part, the dialogue remains deft and the plot twists invigorating. This film engenders empathy for characters Hollywood often neglects, and it

Calling the new A Star Is Born a “valentine” from its star, Lady Gaga, to her fans sounds a bit coy and delicate, so let’s call it what it really is: a hot French kiss (with full-on tongue), filled with passion, tears and a staggering amount of chutzpah. Generously emotional and all the more fun for it, the movie functions as something akin to a Marvel-esque origin story, with Gaga’s own mythology—vamping it up at drag cabarets, etc.—subbing in for her character’s background. It's more than smart to have cast her; it's essential to the movie even working. But to watch her character, Ally, become a star—especially onstage during the film’s live moments, which feel frightening, massive and deafening—is an incredible piece of evolution. Gaga is really acting here: shy, somehow smaller, trembling with excitement. Incrementally, she blooms in the spotlight, proudly waving around that Streisand schnozz, the big voice completing the transformation. She’s extraordinary, and you root for her to go supernova per the scenario’s time-honored trajectory. Director-co-star Bradley Cooper has something else in mind, though. Just as his own performance—as Jackson Maine, this film’s rocker on the downslide—ends up being one of those grumbly beard chews (if you remember the 1976 version, you might describe it as "Kristoffersonian"), his steering of the drama is understated: modest and unshowy. He’s trying to make a “real” version of this glitziest of stories (whatever that means), and you lov

Venom, a slick-skinned alien “symbiote” who first plagued Marvel’s Peter Parker back in a 1984 issue, has a Wikipedia entry roughly 8,400 words long. That’s not to say that the villain deserves his own film—even a silly one like Venom—or to be played by the jittery but sometimes inspired Tom Hardy of Mad Max: Fury Road and The Revenant. (A similar idea already came to the movies anyway, with 1987’s inventive body-swapper The Hidden.) It only suggests that a lot of people take even the marginalia of comics seriously, so seriously that they might not know when they’re getting shortchanged. It’s these superfans, not casual cineplexers expecting just another monolithic smackdown, who are going to feel the most crushed as Venom slides off the rails. When exactly does this happen? Is it when you realize that Hardy is going to be using a distracting Squiggy-esque Noo Yawk accent the whole time as Eddie Brock, a hard-charging San Francisco-based investigative journalist? Or when Eddie’s fiancée, Anne (poor Michelle Williams), supposedly a sharp lawyer, dumps him on the street, ring and all, after she gets fired by her Elon Musk-ish billionaire boss Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed) after Eddie asks him a few uncomfortable questions about his mysterious labs? “Have a nice life,” we hear twice in a few minutes, a repetition that just feels like lazy screenwriting. Nope, the moment when it all slides into accidental comedy comes when the booming voice of the alien (Hardy again, aurally masked