Since 1963, the Austrian birthrate has halved. You can’t blame Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s new thriller, Goodnight Mommy, for the trend, but it sure isn’t helping. The quiet creepshow follows 11-year-old twins Lukas and Elias (Lukas and Elias Schwarz, great), who suspect their mom (Susanne Wuest) wishes they hadn’t…
Charlie Kaufman is a cartographer of the soul. You can picture him hunched over parchment accurately inking each dark river and, off to the side, cautioning that there be dragons. What makes Kaufman cinema’s best psychoanalyst is a contradiction. He sees people for who we are — hurtful, hopeful, lovely,…
“I’ve turned into this kind of crazy optimist,” Michael Moore admits in his new documentary Where to Invade Next, his first film in six years. At 61, the gadfly savant has mellowed. Instead of charging into rooms, he shuffles, the American flag wrapped around his shoulders like a grandmother’s shawl. Conservatives…
Director Alex Gibney’s choice to follow this spring’s Scientology slam Going Clear with the fascinating portrait Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine might seem like an about-face. The first documentary clinically eviscerated a religion that everyone loves to loathe. Apple CEO Steve Jobs, however, is adulated to an incredible…
The first famous tennis player was King Louis X of France. Nicknamed Louis the Quarreler for his domestic politics, meaning he was likely a real pain to the ref, King Louis is renowned for two facts in athletic lore: He invented the indoor tennis court, and, after a hard, hot…
It’s a perfect summer afternoon in Los Angeles, and Lily Tomlin wants to do everything: drive to Neptune’s Net in Malibu, explore the L.A. River, tour Koreatown, grab cocktails in West Hollywood. She jumps in her 1955 Dodge Royal Lancer — her other car, a Prius, balances out its ecological…
Remake The Graduate today, and an adult might corner Benjamin Braddock and whisper, “Startups.” Debut director Max Joseph gives that a good shot, though the result — the EDM-fueled, drug-laced dream-crusher We Are Your Friends — is so sweaty and silly that people may not notice. Like Mike Nichols, Joseph…
“You could make five different N.W.A movies. We made the one we wanted to make.” That’s director F. Gary Gray during an audience Q&A after a recent screening of Straight Outta Compton, the long-awaited N.W.A movie. In our review, Amy Nicholson writes that there’s much more to the group’s story:…
Nima Nourizadeh’s American Ultra is a bloody valentine attached to a bomb. It’s violent, brash, inventive, and horrific, and perhaps the most romantic film of the year. Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart star as Mike and Phoebe, two West Virginia stoners blissed out on weed and each other. “We’re the…
Brooke, Greta Gerwig’s latest Manhattan creation, is a hurricane gobbling up lives. She’s a singer, restaurateur, interior decorator, math coach, spinning instructor, and self-described autodidact. When 18-year-old admirer Tracy (Lola Kirke), Brooke’s sister-to-be following their parents’ Thanksgiving wedding, squeaks that she wants to write short stories, Brooke devours that idea,…
In the holy trinity of N.W.A., each icon had a power: Dr. Dre produced, Ice Cube wrote the words, and Eazy-E was the comic relief. N.W.A.’s biopic, Straight Outta Compton, blurs those roles. Both Dre and Cube produced the film and seem to have edited the script with a red…
Jonathan Demme’s rock ‘n’ roll dramedy Ricki and the Flash exists in a wormhole where the last five decades of pop culture are a blur. There’s 66-year-old Meryl Streep, playing a broke singer who ditched her family to dominate the stage with the whiskey growl of Janis Joplin, the jangly…
Jason Segel didn’t tell his book club he’d been cast as novelist David Foster Wallace in James Ponsoldt’s biopic The End of the Tour. “I didn’t want to sound like Fancy Pants McGee,” admits Segel over lunch in Los Angeles. (Especially since the 6-foot-4-inch comedy actor is famous for dropping his…
At 53, Tom Cruise is past the retirement age of every James Bond except Roger Moore. Yet his 19-year-old Mission: Impossible series ticks on, counting down the seconds till its next explosion — and Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is determined to unman his cross-Atlantic competition. Forget high-tech gadgets. The older Cruise…
Dana Nachman’s Batkid Begins marches in with the mini-movie you’ve already seen. (Unless, as Bruce Wayne suffered in The Dark Knight Rises, you’ve spent months in a hole.) On a November weekday in San Francisco — a.k.a. Gotham-by-the-Bay — 5-year-old cancer survivor Miles Scott rode shotgun in a Lamborghini Batmobile,…
Here’s a shocker: In Pixels, his latest, Adam Sandler plays a stunted man-child who turns out to be very, very special. That’s his ecological niche: the Manic Potbellied Dream Dork, or, if you prefer, the fragile Sand-Man. Sandler films have predictable scripts: In two hours or less, he’ll transform from…
At the start of Woody Allen’s campus comedy Irrational Man, caddish professor Abe Lucas (Joaquin Phoenix) drives up to a new school that’s already steeled itself for his arrival. “Of course, my reputation — a reputation — preceded me,” admits Abe. Such defensiveness also applies to his tabloid-attacked director, who…
Two and a half years ago, Judd Apatow released This Is 40, the most personal film of his career. He was anxious. He usually is. His default setting is inward panic. “I don’t know if people can understand the pressure to be funny,” Apatow says today, “just knowing how badly…
Imagine Donald Trump wanted to reboot his disastrous presidential campaign announcement month to start over as a younger man with real hair. In Tarsem Singh’s Self/less, Trump could hire the medical geniuses of Phoenix Biogenic to transfer his aging brain into a strapping hot bod for $250 million — the…
Steven Soderbergh’s 2012 Magic Mike was a tease. The ads tempted audiences with sweaty chests and thrusting crotches, but after Soderbergh lured us in to his all-male strip club, he turned on the lights to show us the squalor. His hunks were drugged and morally decayed. The women — the…
Five films into the franchise, Terminator: Genisys feels like a VHS cassette that’s been rewound and recorded over for 31 years. Director Alan Taylor (of the unmemorable Thor: The Dark World) gives us images — a thumbs-up, an abandoned factory, a liquid-metal cop smashing through the windshield of a car…
Crystal Moselle’s documentary The Wolfpack is a Manhattan fable about fear. Two decades ago, a Hare Krishna, conspiracy theorist, and self-described god named Oscar Angulo moved from Peru to a public housing tenement on the Lower East Side with his American bride, Susanne, whom he’d met and wooed on the…
