If it had come out 20 years ago, when its creator was Hollywood’s best-paid screenwriter, Shane Black’s The Nice Guys might have stood, for some, as more proof that the studios had lost their way. So much money lavished on bloody buddy formula, on two-fisted archetypes cracking a case, some…
In his archly empathetic comedies, Whit Stillman has long chronicled the uncertain ways in which young people of privilege launch themselves into worlds too in decline to offer them much. The debutante-ball life of Metropolitan or the nightclub and publishing circles of The Last Days of Disco are already dying before…
In his mid-late novel Galapagos, Kurt Vonnegut posited that, after millions of years of evolution, all that our simple, seal-like descendants will have in common with us is the habit of cracking up at each other’s farts. Rodrigo García’s sober parable Last Days in the Desert makes a similar claim,…
You know that primly annoyed nice-ish guy that Jason Batemen always plays? The straight-arrow whose barely-held-in disgust suggests that universal American feeling that it’s everyone but you who is the selfish idiot? If you’ve ever suspected that the real Bateman was himself swallowing back some annoyance at the stupidity of…
In ’81 he accessorized his trench coat with high heels and bikini briefs. In ’84 that coat got dandified, high-collared and famously purple, Edwardian formalwear over a frilled tuxedo shirt over that wicked slick of chest hair. It was the get-up of a perv or a president, a look that…
Elvis Presley once watched Dr. Strangelove three times in one night at a Memphis movie theater. After that, he made them play the last reel several more times, marveling at it. It’s fascinating to wonder about: Here’s this country’s biggest musical star, the leading man in movies he knew were…
Deep into her earnest, uncertain Nina Simone drama Nina, writer-director Cynthia Mort at last musters up a sequence of gravity and power. The inimitable Miss Simone — imitated here by Zoe Saldana — reads a letter from a woman who has recently lost her mother, a great Simone fan. It’s…
Score one for going home again. After misfiring with Begin Again, a film that asked us to worry over a disillusioned A&R man’s efforts to coax a folk-pop album out of Keira Knightley, writer-director John Carney has turned back to the striving Irish of Once, his breakout hit. He’s also…
Stately, earthy, graphic, riveting: Gabriel Mascaro’s Neon Bull is one of those art-house studies that plops the camera down someplace far from us and, in exquisite long takes, examines the lives that almost seem to just be happening there anyway. No matter how rigorously worked out each shot and its…
Clowning, bullet-riddled rom-com Mr. Right is awfully charming in the best and worse sense of the phrase. It’s often kind of awful but also weirdly, effervescently charming, a movie that salves, with its stars’ radiance and charisma, even as it grates. What hurts: lots of vaguely comic hitman drama, with…
The musician biopic might be stale and stupid as a genre, but it will endure. Each new one offers the possibility of the wondrous thing that made Hollywood into Hollywood: presence. You can guess from the trailers that I Saw the Light might be a botch job as drama, but…
Have you ever considered the fact that, in 1951, Hank Williams actually wrote “Hey Good Lookin'”? That, for the first 175 years years of American history, those words and that melody weren’t already part of our shared heritage? Williams didn’t just pluck it out of the air, of course. Cole…
Prestige cable flatters us about the past. It lets us vacation in the backwardness of previous generations, usually while throwing some empathetic side-eye. Gape at Mad Men’s blithe white dudes, each convinced he earned every bit of authority he commands over women and minorities. Or thank Jezebel that we’ve evolved…
Like the Juggernaut or St. Patrick’s Day drunks, nothing can stop the hundreds of hours of filmed superhero junk that hits our faceholes each year. But rest easy, true believer! Once in a while, the onslaught can still offer surprise and pleasure. A shiver of both hit me minutes into…
Here’s a minor miracle. From tiny Lighthouse Pictures, which specializes in Hallmark Channel originals with Christmas in the title, comes Bob Nelson’s The Confirmation, a bittersweet comedy about family, faith and a young boy saving up all his minor sins so he’ll have something to dish at confession. The surprise?…
Brash yet intimate, writer-director-editor Trey Edward Shults’ observant, unnerving first feature transcends the notion of a “promising debut.” Here, the promise is already fulfilled on the screen, which bustles with chaotic family life — and prickles with anxiety. Krisha is a heartsick family story that plays as psychological horror, its…
In one key way, the kinda-maybe sequel 10 Cloverfield Lane might be the purest example yet of the J.J. Abrams house style. Directed by first-timer Dan Trachtenberg but produced by Abrams (Super 8, Lost, Alias, Cloverfield, etc.) the thriller is yet another of the fannish wunderbrand’s mystery boxes, a genre…
Why is it that little movies about being out of step so often wind up feeling the same? Not long into Michael Showalter’s Hello, My Name Is Doris, a comedy about a misfit frump pining for a much younger hunk, the unlikely target of the heroine’s affections muses to his…
Let’s give Gods of Egypt this much: An hour in, a giant cobra crashes and explodes like a bad guy’s car in a dumb movie from the ’70s. That snake, one of two in Alex Proyas’ film, is wide as a locomotive and long as a parade. It’s also straddled…
We’ve all been there. You finally get around to watching this year’s nominees, and you think, “Didn’t I see pretty much this same Oscar-bait movie last year?” You probably did, thanks to the McKee/Weinstein-driven formula behind most Best Picture noms. You can even build your own! Just mix and match…
Bad cop movies — whether bad movies about cops or movies about bad cops — can be like those Arctic core samples from which scientists determine long-gone CO2 levels, though in this case they’re measuring American anxiety about police authority. Pop on John Hillcoat’s agonized pulp thriller Triple 9 in…
We’ve all been there. You finally get around to watching this year’s nominees, and you think, “Didn’t I see pretty much this same Oscar-bait movie last year?” You probably did, thanks to the McKee/Weinstein-driven formula behind most Best Picture noms. You can even build your own! Just mix and match…
