Critics often dismiss blockbuster entertainments with the vague, half-assed complaint that they resemble “video games.” Movies like Fede Alvarez’s Don’t Breathe reveal games’ actual influence — for the better. The breakthrough with studio horror films in recent years, since the found-footage boom, is a welcome environmental immersiveness. It’s a testament…
Just like there’s a bizarro internet where Donald Trump is celebrated as a warm, loving, generous, successful businessman who really wants to earn a Purple Heart, I wonder if there’s also a bizarro, ravenous audience awaiting a feature-film re-enactment of Donald and Melania’s epic first date. (He literally tricked his…
The attempt to reconcile the personal with the political has been the great theme of Nanni Moretti’s cinema, as it was for many of the legendary Italian directors before him. In Mia Madre, it finds one of its more vivid examinations. The film’s concept is blunt — a director struggles…
We should be tired of wondering why Scandinavians are so fascinated with runaway crime — it’s obviously because they have so little of it. Set in Chicago or Bangkok or Juarez, vicious bloodletting might play like wallpaper, but it comes off as almost surreal, and a little gimmicky, when framed…
Robert De Niro — the Raging Bull himself, now aged from boxer to trainer — is introduced in Hands of Stone bathed in Madison Square Garden’s overhead spotlights, more the image of a reigning champ than the promising fighter whose American debut his character Ray Arcel has come to see…
It’s hard out there for a TV comedy fan. That’s the case for network television, at least. Before All in the Family altered the TV comedy landscape, most sitcoms hewed closely to the formula of solving minor annoyances in 22 minutes (with the occasional “OMG Vincent Price in Hawaii” curveball)…
Remember how The Grinder was canceled and it shouldn’t have been? That sucked. And to make matters worse, a bunch more shows weren’t canceled that definitely should have been. There are more than enough hours and channels in existence that the shit easily outnumbers more entertaining programming, but some of…
Every week, we’re recapping season two of Degrassi: Next Class. You wanna pizza this? The Degrassi empire is impressive not only because of its multi-decade run, but also the amount of students with significant storylines during their time walking those hallowed halls. Each year, students come and go, and those…
In a summer of disappointing reboots, underperforming sequels and rejected franchise bait, Ben-Hur is something rare: a remake no one asked for but weary moviegoers might accept as a small gift for lack of any better option. Timur Bekmambetov’s reimagining of William Wyler’s 1959 epic, itself preceded by two silent…
We’re recapping Difficult People, episode by episode. Hey, you look homeschooled! It’s been slow going for Billy and Julie on season two of Difficult People. Between the two, they’ve failed at resolutions not to have anonymous sex at the gym, killed Nathan Lane, kept their porn to themselves, pretended to…
The Bronx is burning in the introductory episodes of The Get Down, Netflix’s new series that presents as urban-cinematic fable the genesis of rap. The cluttered, over-caffeinated 90-minute pilot, directed by creator and executive producer Baz Luhrmann, takes place in the summer of 1977, when a serial killer terrorized New…
Once, American comedies concerned underdog heroes who challenged the status quo and seized the territory of the upper-class characters who thought they were in control. Slobs vs. snobs. During the wartime administration of the lesser President Bush, the wealthy thoroughly dominated the culture, occupying America the way the army patrolled…
From its opening image — of a distraught woman battling massive ocean waves on a moonlit night — to its surprisingly ambiguous final shot — of what, I won’t say — Kubo and the Two Strings sears itself into your brain. The stop-motion animation studio Laika has perfected, over the…
Baseball is boring. And I’m saying this as someone who loves and plays the game, as someone who’s watched all of Ken Burns’ Baseball and as someone who agrees with Red Barber that “Baseball is dull only to dull minds” — we’re all gonna be a little dull in a…
Natalie Portman proves herself a filmmaker of intelligence, ambition, and inventiveness in her debut as a director and writer — just not one who is always certain as a storyteller. A Tale of Love and Darkness adapts, with a passionate somberness, several threads from Amos Oz’s autobiographical novel of the…
Hey. Do you guys remember puppet comedian Jeff Dunham, whose downtrodden Mexican “on a steeeek” character José Jalapeño delighted many a middle-class white American in the ’90s? Well, imagine he blazed up a joint with Bill Maher, wrote a manifesto on atheism and then made a multimillion-dollar animated feature film…
The central conceit of Imperium — Daniel Radcliffe playing an FBI agent who goes undercover as a white supremacist — is laughable, and the film, to its credit, knows this. Harry Potter as a skinhead? Don’t worry, that’s all part of the plan. Well, maybe. Writer/director Daniel Ragussis tries to…
In contemporary film, it’s typical for an African American character to be the sole person of color in the story, only existing to reveal hidden racism or make white people uncomfortable with themselves. Black characters rarely get to talk to other black characters. Last year, Manohla Dargis suggested a new…
Late in Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World, his unsurprisingly wry, quizzical documentary survey on life inside and beside the virtual world, Werner Herzog stumps two brain researchers with a lyrical question in that instantly recognizable (and often parodied) German accent: “Does the internet dream of itself?” An ever-adventurous…
Michael German went undercover with white supremacists for a year and with right-wing militants for another eight months, and now he wants to set some things straight. “One of the things I learned working undercover is that the studies that the FBI or even academia had on these groups were…
Every week, we’re recapping season two of Degrassi: Next Class. Now, who do we have to pay to make the Brown Cloud app a real thing? The Degrassi students have had a rough time these first few episodes of the season. Racism, mental illness, break-ups . . . and that…
We’re recapping Difficult People, episode by episode. Make a wish. Let’s get ready to rum… do the best we can! So reads the banner in the high school gym where Difficult People’s “36 Candles” opens. Think of it as our roadmap for the episode. Arthur is competing in a PBS versus NPR…
