Matt Johnson’s prankish Operation Avalanche boasts a strong half hour of footage that’s fully engaged with this question: Could a couple of bright, Kubrick-obsessed A.V. geeks have faked the moon landing in 1969? Like the best speculative fiction, these scenes concern the practicalities. We see the gang’s hidden-camera peek at…
Still and silent, Jerry Lewis slumps there like old furniture in the lifeless house in which the first half of Daniel Noah’s coming-of-old-age drama Max Rose molders. The film is a fiction, a tidy and improbable one, but these scenes have documentary power. Lewis’ Max Rose, recently bereaved, sits and…
What’s constant in Katherine Dieckmann’s films – Motherhood (2009), Diggers (2006) and A Good Baby (2000) – is an attention to characters and place. Many of us in the world of film reside in the big coastal cities, but a good number come from somewhere else, smaller towns with subtle…
According to Forbes, Fan Bingbing made $17 million last year — more than any actress on the planet not named Jennifer Lawrence, Melissa McCarthy, Scarlett Johansson or Jennifer Aniston. The Chinese megastar is likely most familiar to American audiences for a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it role in X-Men: Days of Future Past, but…
Our critic April Wolfe is filing updates all week from the Toronto International Film Festival. When a quiet film is set outside of the big cities — New York, L.A., Chicago — it’s often called a “slice of life.” But that’s ultimately a condescending designation; to the millions of people…
Our critic April Wolfe is filing updates all week from the Toronto International Film Festival. Writer/director Ivan I. Tverdovsky may be a twentysomething male, but in his sophomore feature, he exhibits a direct pipeline into the psyche of a lonely, middle-aged woman. In Zoology, a lowly zoo worker suddenly sprouts…
At first glance, TV (The Book), which came out last week, may look like a survey of what two respected TV critics consider to be the greatest television shows of all time. But, really, it’s a book about friendship. The joint authors of this tome, Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller…
Better Things’ creators seem to anticipate that you’ll judge Sam Fox’s parenting – and they make you pay for it. In the first scene, Sam (Pamela Adlon) scrolls through her phone on a mall bench while her youngest daughter, Duke (Olivia Edward), cries and pulls on her arm. It’s one…
To show all that he can do, to show something of what life’s actually like, Donald Glover first has to break your heart. Glover – the star, creator, and often writer of FX’s tense, downwardly mobile hangout comedy Atlanta – is best known, still, as a handsome clown on NBC’s Community, Dan…
“They should have sent a poet,” says Jodie Foster’s teary-eyed astronaut as she gazes upon the glory of space in Contact. It took nearly 20 years, but Terrence Malick has taken it upon himself to answer that call with Voyage of Time. Not every line rhymes, and some privilege sound…
Compelling television is a wonderful thing, except when the viewer is compelled to change the channel. The 2016 fall television season has a few promising shows and several, well, that only promise to battle each other for what show will be cancelled first. While some of the following shows probably…
Every week, we’re recapping season two of Degrassi: Next Class, episode by episode. Go Panthers, go! The Degrassi empire has been built on a solid foundation of “going there” in its story lines. They’ve covered just about everything, from school shootings to abortions, gender identity to alcoholism — and more…
Let’s be honest: A reality show on TLC can be hard to take seriously. The network has in many ways made a habit of creating shows that feel dangerously close to exploitation if they haven’t already crossed that line. In addition to being the progenitors of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, its current…
Where were you when you learned that you’d be making your DJ debut at the biggest rave of the year? And that said rave was only eight hours away? Ethan, the sheepish main character of Netflix’s straight-to-streaming EDM movie XOXO, gets the news in his kitchen, where his mom is cooking breakfast…
Leonard Nimoy’s 1975 memoir, I Am Not Spock, stirred fan outrage: How dare the actor, who was indeed Spock in the original Star Trek series, publicly dismiss his beloved half-human, half-Vulcan alter ego? According to Adam Nimoy, Leonard’s son and the director of the heartwarming but uninventive documentary For the Love…
The techniques of verbatim theater go back decades, to at least the 1950s, when young German theater troupes would re-enact complicated court cases word for word onstage. Even earlier, in the United States, the WPA paid for a form of this performance with its Living Newspapers, in which theater artists…
Like American Sniper (2014), Clint Eastwood’s Sully is a movie of nightmares. In Sniper, Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) sits rigidly in the living room, imagining the gunfire, roaring helicopters and wailing bystanders of Fallujah playing out on a turned-off television as his children race through the house. In Sully, Chesley…
A decade after the fact, the scandal of JT LeRoy — the HIV-positive, young male (though gender-fluid) writer adored by scores of global alt celebrities who was revealed to be the creation of a woman named Laura Albert — is relitigated in Jeff Feuerzeig’s queasily absorbing documentary Author: The JT…
Christian Carion’s refugees-on-the-march World War II drama Come What May is the kind of old-fashioned war movie that’s crafted not just to emphasize history’s horror and brutality. Yes, Carion stages the occasional slaughter with heartsick brio, and sometimes can’t resist taking pleasure when the violence goes against the bad guys,…
Horror has in recent years been so informed by found footage, smartphones, and Skype that a trend toward folklore was probably inevitable. Far from trying to capture the moment, arthouse movies like The Babadook, It Follows, and now Demon aspire to a kind of timelessness — what was old has…
What happens when a director takes his own life before he’s able to see his work open in theaters? In the case of Marcin Wrona and Demon, his mesmerizing Polish art-horror film, Olga Szymanska, Wrona’s producing partner and wife, has pressed on. She has traveled with the film, watching the…
Eight minutes into the pilot episode of Cinemax’s new crime show Quarry — an uneven but largely rewarding translation of Max Allan Collins’ crime books into emotionally challenging, character-driven television — Marine Lloyd “Mac” Conway, Jr. (Logan Marshall-Green) returns home a day early from his second tour in Vietnam. By…
