In his mid-late novel Galapagos, Kurt Vonnegut posited that, after millions of years of evolution, all that our simple, seal-like descendants will have in common with us is the habit of cracking up at each other’s farts. Rodrigo García’s sober parable Last Days in the Desert makes a similar claim,…
Even when working from source material crafted by others, Terence Davies, like all singular filmmakers, imprints it with his DNA. At once solemn and lusty, Davies’ page-to-screen transfer of Scottish author Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s 1932 novel beautifully conveys human fragility, our bodies and minds outmatched by the brute indifference of…
Las Vegas is home to ordinary people who take the bus to work like everyone else. In The Trust, the stylish new heist film from Alex and Benjamin Brewer, we get a brief, satisfying, darkly comic peek at everyday Vegas life as lived by low-level LVPD officers. Then the film…
Every week, we’re recapping the first season of Fuller House, episode by episode. Have mercy, Becky’s back! When we started watching Fuller House, we thought this season, like most other Netflix originals, would only be 10 episodes. Come to find out, it’s a network-average 13 – which is good in…
According to her emails, Hillary Clinton has had an eye on Alicia Florrick since season one. As her pop-culture portraits go, The Good Wife has been a flattering one. Its protagonist first followed in the footsteps of many a political spouse by standing by her man, then relaunched her career,…
Watching first-time feature director Ben Chace’s Sin Alas is like a stroll through the streets of Havana. You weave through crowds in a pedicab, hang out on street corners to hear the latest gossip and meander on the majestic Malecón, the historic esplanade on the city’s coastline. But it’s not…
Each week, we’re recapping the second season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt episode by episode. Take a seat, the performance is starting. Few sitcoms can go for very long without a single bad episode, and it’s actually a little impressive that Kimmy made it this far. But “Kimmy Goes to a Play!”…
On the surface, there has been a lot of forward movement on television for black women. We’re now able to see an incredible breadth of black female characters, including Cookie Lyon (Taraji P. Henson) on Empire, Rosalee (Jurnee Smollett-Bell) on Underground and Dr. Rainbow Johnson (Tracee Ellis Ross) on Black-ish…
I happen to be a daughter with a mother, and I tear up just thinking about how difficult/wonderful it is to have a mom. So you might think Mothers and Daughters, from first-time feature director Paul Duddridge with a script by Paige Cameron, would be my movie. You would be…
Never one to betray the courage of his convictions, Luca Guadagnino excels at the unrepentantly grandiose and ludicrous. The title alone of his previous narrative feature, I Am Love (2009), signaled operatic sweep and loony sincerity, qualities further exalted by the film’s visual ravishments and seductive voluptuousness. The Italian director’s…
Yes, teenagers can be terrifying. Anyone who’s ever crossed the street to avoid whatever angst they might hurl at you out of boredom or unfounded antipathy knows this. Some can be like doughy bread, waiting until all the neurons coalesce, while others can be a ticking time bomb. In Memoria,…
None of us should give a crap about anything anyone says in Elstree 1976, but such is the nature of modern fandom that we do — even those of us whose affection for Star Wars is now more an occasional indulgence than a heated obsession. Jon Spira’s documentary is a…
People’s memories of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 Band of Outsiders (showing in a DCP restoration) tend to emphasize the obvious delights: the scene where the three young leads (Anna Karina, Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur) do the Madison in a Paris café, or the one where, with the goal of beating…
You know that primly annoyed nice-ish guy that Jason Batemen always plays? The straight-arrow whose barely-held-in disgust suggests that universal American feeling that it’s everyone but you who is the selfish idiot? If you’ve ever suspected that the real Bateman was himself swallowing back some annoyance at the stupidity of…
It’s easy to think, based on the marketing, that the first feature film from acclaimed comedy duo Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele will be a hundred minutes of an adorable kitten dressed in a do-rag and gold chain for easy laughs, but Keanu is so so much more than that…
Each week, we’re recapping season one of Fuller House, episode by episode. Danny Tanner’s home, so get ready for some hugging. The eighth episode of Fuller House, titled “Secrets, Lies and Firetrucks,” is as literal as it gets, somehow nicely wrapping up a bunch of story lines that seemed to exist in…
If nothing else, Captain America: Civil War stands as something of a corrective to this spring’s other superheroes-bludgeoning-each-other opus, Batman v Superman. While that film was severe and downcast, Civil War is expansive, at times even light. BvS strove to redefine its superheroes to fit newer, darker, borderline-sociopathic molds; Civil…
Is it too much to ask that all these holiday-themed rom-coms — Valentine’s Day, New Year’s Eve and now Mother’s Day — one day merge with the Halloween movies? Michael Myers might be the only one in either franchise with a truly cutting response to all the rhetorical musings about relationships romantic,…
If you thought the billionaire played by Steve Carell in Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher was eerie, please allow me to introduce you to the real John du Pont. A dangerous concoction of lonely and paranoid, du Pont was blessed with money and mobility and cursed with the kind of childhood that…
Each week, we’re recapping the second season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt episode by episode. Pop on your shants and thigh tops. “Kimmy Goes On A Playdate!” opens with Kimmy in full-on eighth-grader mode as she demands a job at a local year-round Christmas store, employing convincing arguments like “I’VE GOT…
The 2016 NFL draft is nigh upon us, and the Arizona Cardinals are looking to capitalize on a successful season by making an explosive pick with the 29th overall selection in the first round. There is a lot of talent for the Cardinals to choose from when the clock starts…
Fairy tales were meant to be oral stories. Translating the tangents of old women in far-flung villages (whose chips on their shoulders about, say, their brother’s failed shipping business might inspire long asides about the shipping industry) into written texts doesn’t always make for the most linear, easy read. In…
