In most of his eight films and especially since The Fighter (2010), choreographer of chaos and screwball scion David O. Russell has assembled boisterous, buoyant casts. His manic ensemble players, like those in Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, carom off one another, their high-pitched energy keeping the movies bustling…
Here’s a challenge. Gather some friends, pour some drinks, and announce to everyone the premise of Daddy’s Home, the new family comedy about dads competing to be pater superior. It won’t take long: Will Ferrell is a doting schlemiel of a stepdad to suburban moppets whose biological father, played by…
Concussion isn’t much of a movie, but it’s a fascinating bellwether for where the National Football League currently stands on chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the degenerative brain disease associated with many of its former players. As it happens, the human brain isn’t supposed to whip against the skull like a…
Fueled by impotent, blustery outrage, Adam McKay’s The Big Short, about the grotesque banking and investing practices that led to the 2008 financial collapse, is about as fun and enlightening as a cranked-up portfolio manager’s rue-filled comedown after an energy-shot bender. Based on Michael Lewis’ 2010 bestselling book of the…
Ralph Rainger and Leo Robin’s sweet nectarine of a jazz standard “Easy Living” figures, in a glancing yet potent way, in Todd Haynes’ Carol, adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt. Even though the lyrics speak of contentment — “Living for you is easy living/It’s easy to…
Here’s to Quentin Tarantino’s cussed perversity. The Hateful Eight, his intimate, suspenseful western splatter-horror comedy, has been shot at great expense in the long-gone 70 mm format, but the movie itself is set almost entirely in cramped interiors. He’s hired Ennio Morricone to score the thing, but don’t expect rousing…
It’s the end of the year, and that means looking back at our favorite cultural moments, celebrity relationships, theatrical productions, and art exhibitions. But it’s also time to reflect on the best sex scenes from our favorite TV shows of 2015 — from the cerebral final season of Mad Men to…
Lurid, muscular and unafraid to look at turn-of-the-century Manhattan’s rotting guts, The Knick has distinguished itself in the crowded antihero-drama landscape through its mosaic portrait of a city on the verge of implosion and epidemic – detailed with an extraordinary visual expressiveness (courtesy of Steven Soderbergh, who directs every episode)…
When Concussion hits big screens across the country on Christmas Day, it’s sure to spark discussion. The film is based on a true story and stars Will Smith as Dr. Bennet Omalu, the Nigerian-born forensic pathologist and former medical examiner who first discovered a deadly brain injury in professional football players. It…
This winter packs some major milestones for science fiction television and film. Star Wars will once again grace the silver screen with J.J. Abrams’ The Force Awakens on December 18. It is sure to redefine, once again, the use of lens flare. X-Files will also be returning to our homes on January 24, hopefully with the same…
A while back, a friend expressed concern that her son, a 10-year-old, was watching too much My Little Pony. “It’s sweet,” she said, “but not what I’d choose.” I asked what she would prefer that he watch. “Well, his dad started him on that new Star Wars cartoon.” That cartoon…
Life is hard for the extravagantly wealthy lounging about in one of the world’s most beautiful hotels. Paolo Sorrentino’s latest might seem easy to mock — here, after all, are Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel, playing a composer and a film director, moping in a Swiss spa about old age…
Cynthia Nixon is such a terrific actress that she can steady even the wobbliest material. In writer-director Josh Mond’s modestly scaled family drama James White, she plays Gail, the mother of 20-something underachiever James (Christopher Abbott, of Girls), a guy who can never seem to lay hands on a clean…
What’s quietly revolutionary about Sisters is that it’s a dumb party movie like a million others. The hosts score booze, invite over dozens of friends and frenemies, and then watch in horror — and a touch of self-congratualtory awe — as their house gets trashed. With the sunrise comes lessons,…
The Danish Girl, Tom Hooper’s portrait of Jazz Age painters Gerda Wegener and her spouse, Einar, who butterflied into Lili Elbe via the first sexual-assignment surgery, is about gender and it isn’t. Like its subject, it’s fatally resolved to fit an ideal: the noble Oscar-bait biopic. If the script swapped…
George Lucas is the L. Ron Hubbard of Hollywood. Both men were sci-fi dreamers turned mega-millionaires who spun their pulp adventures into a religion. Tap the power within yourself, they urged. The faithful forked over their dollars. Then both Lucas and Hubbard mucked up their simple premise with add-ons like…
When The Mindy Project debuted in 2012, one of its two main inspirations, the big-screen romantic comedy, was already dead. Kate Hudson’s last studio rom-com (Something Borrowed) was released the year before, Katherine Heigl’s (Life as We Know It) the year before that. With their Harry/Sally-esque slant-rhyming names, The Mindy…
In addition to stocking stuffers this holiday season, Phoenicians will have a chance to catch their favorite drag stars — stuffed in their own stockings — as they take over Orpheum Theatre. The cream of RuPaul’s Drag Race contestant crop arrive in Phoenix on Sunday, December 27, with a slew of…
Comedian Gregg Turkington sits at an airport bar in Van Nuys, orders a spiced whiskey sour — the joint’s too-sweet specialty cocktail — and stares out the window at the tiny commuter jets he hates. “I’m terrified of flying, like seriously freaked out,” he says. “But I fly more than…
Justin Kurzel’s is a Macbeth stripped of lit-class ponderousness, stage-bound declaiming, Ren Fest cosplay, and prestige-film pomposity. It is the essence of this cruelest of plays, the blade unsheathed — and, as a blade would be after hacking through all these Scottish wars, its edge is blunt, rough, a thing…
They could have called it Hitchcock/Truffaut/Scorsese/Fincher. Less an adaptation of one of the great books about film than a feature-length recommendation, Kent Jones’ documentary take on François Truffaut’s exhaustive career-survey 1966 interview with Alfred Hitchcock is an arresting précis, sharply edited and generous with its film clips — it’s a…
There’s terrific comic potential in the idea at the heart of Don Verdean, the latest shrug of a film from Jared and Jerusha Hess, the husband-wife writer-director team behind Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre, and one that for good reason you haven’t seen, Gentlemen Broncos. That idea: A fraud of a…
