In October of last year, in southwestern Kansas, three members of a militia called “The Crusaders” were arrested and charged with planning to blow up an apartment complex in tiny Garden City housing 120 Somali immigrants. According to Tom Beall, the Acting U.S. State’s Attorney, one defendant had said that…
Quick, name an Archie Andrews personality trait. Yes, he’s red-headed and red-blooded, a horndog naïf with hashtag sideburns who is forever battled over by beauties he can’t be bothered to get anywhere with. But beyond that — who is he? Sometimes he’s in a sugar-sweet pop combo. Sometimes he tools…
Like its subject, the man who took McDonald’s from a single burger shop to a globe-straddling child-fattener, John Lee Hancock’s The Founder can’t stop selling. The first fast-food kitchen, set up in 1953 by the solemn McDonald brothers in San Bernardino, gets celebrated here as rousingly as John Glenn’s first…
Despite his reputation, M. Night Shyamalan has never lived and died by the twist. His best films, like Unbreakable or even last year’s cheerily nasty wicked-grandparents thriller The Visit, work first as accomplished, emotionally engaging suspense. What’s most memorable about them isn’t the final-act revelations or even the quietly impressive…
Almost all of the history of American movies flows into Steven Spielberg, and the movies that have come since can’t help but be in response. As a storyteller and as a cultural figure, his closest precedent isn’t John Ford or David Lean, but Dickens, another age’s popular titan, beloved more…
Like craft beers or your news feed, Netflix’s niche-viewing categories are forever growing more micro-specific. Its new drama series, an eight-part bafflement called The OA, could only be categorized as a Sexually Frank Spiritual Locked-Room Suburban Afterlife Mad Scientist Communitarian Interpretive-Dance Ripped-From-the-Headlines Horror Puzzle Mystery. Its flavors never unite into…
Accepting the Welt Literature Prize in Berlin on November 10 of this year, the novelist Zadie Smith said, “Time travel is a discretionary art: a pleasure trip for some and a horror story for others.” She was speaking, of course, of the conviction among so many white people that there’s…
Parents be warned: J. A. Bayona and Patrick Ness’ kid-meets-beast coming-of-age fantasy is a reclamation of fairy stories from the reassuring fiction of happily ever after. In a lineup of holiday releases — or, soon, a streaming queue — this tale of a bullied Irish boy whose best friend is…
Carrie Fisher was always smarter than the words and roles written for her, smarter than what Hollywood thought it wanted out of a princess. On Christmas Eve of the all-devouring Sarlacc that is 2016, after word had spread that Fisher had suffered a heart attack, a page from her original…
The Assassin’s Creed video games are about skipping through tedious cut scenes set in the present so that you can vault into the past, through and over gorgeous recreations of the roofs and streets of medieval and Renaissance cities. Sometimes you chase floating feathers through Florence. Often, you’ll sneak behind…
Incorporated comes on like the kind of TV show you think you have to pay close attention to. There’s more consideration of climate change in the tense Syfy dystopian thriller than in all four-and-a-half hours of this fall’s presidential debates. As the series opens, stern white titles on a black…
The cussedness of La La Land is almost enough to recommend it. Damien Chazelle’s sumptuous tribute to romantics trying to keep lit the fire of a guttering culture is defiantly old-fashioned in form and style. It is, among other things, a throwback to the great MGM musicals of the Gene…
Here’s a promise few movies can make. If you sink two hours into Collateral Beauty now, it’s guaranteed that for the rest of your life, when conversation stalls, you can save the night by asking, “Did you ever see that movie where Will Smith plays an ad executive so shut…
Saroo Brierley’s memoir A Long Way Home examines, in its uncertain prose, one of the signal concerns of our age: How do those of us who have grown up in relative comfort square our good luck with the lot of the rest of the world? That question gets feinted at…
Look, Shia LaBeouf was approximately the 27th worst thing in that last Indiana Jones movie, and his intense-yet-distracted turns in the Transformers series aren’t legit strikes against him. Would you have turned down all that money to be posed by Michael Bay for a couple months every few years? Now,…
Alia Shawkat’s great comic skill is for the continually fresh expression of a determined disgust. That eager face of hers, beneath its constellations of freckles and her great Harpo-frizzed curls, is forever souring up with disappointment, even as her characters strive not to let this on. To feel let down…
There’s a grand concept to Seasons, the mostly terrestrial animal-observation doc from the creators of Winged Migration and Oceans, but in practice the film, a beauty, is about animals surprising you. You’ll be pleasantly engaged in observing a bird standing there after a snowfall, and then a snowbank will shudder…
Anna Biller’s ripe, vibrant The Love Witch is an act of reclamation — and love. In this out-of-time extravaganza of feminist-satanist serial-killer erotica, the writer/director/producer — plus editor and set and costume designer — has crafted the best kind of homage or parody, the kind that honors every thrill and…
“Are we really in our generation going to allow the biggest mammal on earth to disappear?” asks a conservationist late in Richard Ladkani and Kief Davidson’s propulsive ivory-trade doc. That simple question cuts to the heart in ways that much of this showy, desperately dramatic pseudo-thriller doesn’t. The title is…
It’s too much to ask that a studio money-maker/sequel-generator like Doctor Strange actually be strange, much less flaunt doctoral levels of weirdness. Instead, it’s Strange 101 in super HD, its lavish pop-art psychedelia in service of 1963 comic-book story beats. The attractions this time are Benedict Cumberbatch, haughtily Randian as…
America never understood Oasis’ hugeness. By that I don’t just mean the band’s epochal mid-’90s global popularity or the nationalistic fervor it stirred in the U.K. I mean, simply, its hugeness of sound. In the States, only the ballads connected, the glorious/meaningless Beatle raptures “Wonderwall,” “Live Forever,” and “Champagne Supernova”…
Have there ever been entertainment-media product tie-ins like the Ouija movies? The shriekingly enjoyable Ouija: Origin of Evil, like its less successful 2014 predecessor Ouija, lays out as its best case that the toy it’s advertising will destroy your life, maybe kill your family and damn your very soul. 30…
