Let’s break the bad news this way. Maria Bamford’s new Netflix series isn’t a disaster. It’s sometimes funny — it’s got comic genius Maria Bamford in almost every scene! — but only its finest moments bear the stamp of sensibility. Too often, this fitful, clamorous show feels Bamford-flavored rather than…
The slow-moving parade of clamor and stupidity that stops up Times Square might annoy New Yorkers. But late in Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and Andy Schocken’s cross-cultural jam-session music doc Song of Lahore, the giddy garishness of those blocks comes to exemplify the very idea of free expression. As the Naked Cowboy butchers…
In TV and movies, sex is often portrayed as this romantic and perfect thing. Rarely shown are any of the problems that can arise during sex, and it’s even rarer that there’s an onscreen sense of humor about such things. But once in a while, films and television shows portray…
In Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising, the sequel to 2014’s old-people-vs.-frat-brothers comedy, Zac Efron takes off his shirt in nearly every scene he’s in. It’s a sight to behold — again and again and again, but a calculated effort, like most of this film, to appeal to the ladies. As surprising…
The first time I saw the documentary Weiner, at Missouri’s True/False Festival this past March, Donald Trump was boasting about the size of his cock during a presidential debate. Given the recent direction of our electoral politics, you might think that a film about former New York Representative Anthony Weiner…
Orenthal James Simpson always seemed a singular figure. Hardly anybody got where he got or did what he did. Certainly nobody got away with it. But of course it isn’t just the man who fascinates: It’s the image. This he shares in common with every super-grandee and megastar, every tabloid…
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 tight, trim, health insurance thriller A Monster With a Thousand Heads, Mexican-Uruguayan director Rodrigo Plá achieves a visual style that is ice cold but also deeply human — a clever way to depict an all-powerful system that feeds on our lives and thrives on our fallibility. Plá opens…
Richard Bridgland was given an impossible task: recreate 1970s Hollywood for Shane Black’s buddy conspiracy thriller The Nice Guys … in Atlanta. As a production designer, Bridgland’s had to make the Czech Republic look like 1930s rural North Carolina (Serena), New Orleans look like West Virginia (American Ultra) and a…
As generic and impersonal as a new credit-card offer, Jodie Foster’s Money Monster is the latest big-studio production to try to cash in on populist outrage over Wall Street abuses and New Gilded Age inequality. There’s a lot of excitable talk about algorithms (or “algos”), the overuse of the term…
Each week, we will be recapping season one of Fuller House, episode by episode. Please enjoy only pictures of the cast wearing San Francisco Giants gear so they get the most out of whatever they had to pay to get the rights. Fuller House spent its 10th episode taking its…
Over the past week, proud University of Arizona students have been closing their collegiate chapters in ceremonies all around campus, including Friday, May 13’s mega-commencement at Arizona Stadium. It’s been quite a journey for these graduates, now being set out into the world and facing their futures. It’s an excitement…
Ben Wheatley and Amy Jump’s microbudget black-and-white English Civil War mushroom-trip movie A Field in England (2013) squeezed a tense and bizarre story from just a few dudes wandering around in a field. The married couple and filmmaking team — Wheatley as director and Jump as writer — previously made…
At long last, Whit Stillman has adapted a Jane Austen book. To be sure, he has touched on her work numerous times — particularly in his 1990 directorial debut Metropolitan, in which an argument about Mansfield Park gave us the immortal line “I don’t read novels. I prefer good literary…
Each week, we’re recapping the second season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt episode by episode. Watch out for porns. After episode three’s lackluster fare, we were worried that the rest of season two of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt would become a drag to watch. Instead, “Kimmy Kidnaps Gretchen” is a likely frontrunner for…
Not much has been heard from Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan since it won the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, beating out pictures like Todd Haynes’ Carol, László Nemes’ Son of Saul and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin. But going into this understated film cold isn’t a bad way to…
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…
Even by the standards of Yorgos Lanthimos, The Lobster’s premise is a doozy: Colin Farrell plays a recently single schlub forced to report to the Hotel, where he has 45 days to form a romantic relationship lest he be turned into an animal of his choosing. This is the plight…
This week, thousands of Arizona State University graduates will walk across the commencement stage and out into the unknown. Many will have set the foundation for their careers while in school, some even gaining notoriety in the process. With more than 80,000 students in enrolled overall, we’re bound to have…
There’s a scene during the first half of Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Apocalypse that is so emotionally resonant, so well-put-together and so quiet that you might briefly forget you’re watching a superhero film. It involves a raid by some Polish officers in the remote forest where Erik Lehnsherr, aka Magneto (Michael…
Warning: The following contains spoilers for HBO’s Game of Thrones through season 6, episode 3. On last week’s Game of Thrones, we finally saw the moment that some fans prayed would come and others hoped would never happen: Jon Snow came back to life. Certain critics immediately deemed this a great…
In an appreciation published in The Guardian a few days after the death of J.G. Ballard, in April 2009, Martin Amis noted that the paragon of New Wave science fiction was “remorselessly visual.” Ben Wheatley’s muddled adaptation of the dystopian 1975 novel High-Rise — one of many Ballard books that…
