Sharon Jones Won’t Let Cancer Stop the Funk

Barbara Kopple’s Miss Sharon Jones! tells the kind of true story that makes you want to kick creation itself square in the crotch. Here’s that firecracker soul singer, nearing her 60s, her boogie still majestic, her band still a tight retro marvel, her wail still the southern end of a northbound…

Tony Robbins Can Talk You Into Anything

Here’s a story you might have missed a few weeks back, what with the country collapsing. In late June, at Dallas’ Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center, 30 aspirational souls received burn treatment after walking over hot coals at a Tony Robbins seminar. Robbins, a seize-your-life salesman of granite physique and…

Me Tarzan. Me Sorry About Colonialism.

At last, a Hollywood reimagining with a point. David Yates’ two-fisted pulp-studies spree The Legend of Tarzan doesn’t just update Edgar Rice Burroughs’ white-boy jungle-bro for our age of heightened sensitivities and bit rates. It interrogates the very idea of Tarzan, signing the old sport up for the good fight…

In Life, Animated, Disney Helps an Autistic Mind Connect

This quietly moving doc has a hook worthy of the most shameless of Hollywood weepies, offering tragedy and a miracle and much ado about the power of movies themselves. But the film is tender and patient, as fascinated by the challenges of daily life as it is by the dramatic…

At Its Best, Lonely Island’s Popstar Blows Up Our Pop Moment

It’s a feat to out-idiot TMZ culture. In achieving that, the fake-doc white-rapper satire Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is a breakthrough for studio comedies, which here at last catch up to the metabolism and meaninglessness of the internet age. In its generous, frenetic first hour, Popstar’s jokes and parodies…

Holy Hell Offers an Intimate Study of Sun-Kissed Cult Life

There’s reason for skepticism when you hear that a new documentary plays like a thriller. That suggests that the filmmakers have favored suspense over documenting — that the specifics of real life will be arranged according to the logic of plotting rather than reportage. Will Allen’s sunny gut-punch cult exposé, Holy…

Song of Lahore Mashes East and West Into One Great Jazz Whole

The slow-moving parade of clamor and stupidity that stops up Times Square might annoy New Yorkers. But late in Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and Andy Schocken’s cross-cultural jam-session music doc Song of Lahore, the giddy garishness of those blocks comes to exemplify the very idea of free expression. As the Naked Cowboy butchers…