Sean Burns

An early summer festival of bad vibes, “Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair” touts 13 titles that touch on grief, war, illness, and more. WBUR film critic Sean Burns writes that the screenings feel "necessary and even fortifying now that the world around us is such a precipitous shambles."

Based on the 1957 novel "The Executioners," the series stars Javier Bardem as an ex-con hovering around the lawyers (Amy Adams and Patrick Wilson) who put him in jail. "There’s simply no sane way to take such a simple, straightforward premise — psycho stalks family — and drag it out for 10 hours," writes critic Sean Burns.

World War III simmers in the background of “Disclosure Day.” It's with the North Koreans, I think.

Starring Hugh Jackman, writer-director Michael Sarnoski's film is the medieval equivalent of a moody, revisionist Western. "It’s a story about the stories we tell ourselves, and how we can’t help cleaning them up for our children," writes critic Sean Burns.

Poor Kara Zor-El. I was nine years old in 1984 when the original “Supergirl” movie came out, and it was a formative experience for this young critic

Ever since “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” walked into that Las Vegas hotel room back in 1969, filmmakers have been fascinated by what happens when straight-laced couples flirt with libertinism, and each other.

Film critic Roger Ebert often referred to what he called “The Stanton-Walsh Rule,” which dictated that no movie featuring Harry Dean Stanton or M.

The dilapidated fishing vessel from which “Rose of Nevada” takes its name disappeared into the sea off the coast of Cornwall, England, in 1993, bringing with it two members of a shorthanded crew.

It takes a little while to get acclimated to what Christopher Nolan is doing with “The Odyssey.” It's a sword-and-sandal epic without any of the Hollywood pageantry, attempting to ground these heroes of Greek myth in a tactile, workaday reality.

A sparse yet charged exhibition at Phillida Reid, London, sees the artist unsettle his minimalist language to confront urgent political conflicts