It’s clear why Angelina Jolie Pitt became a star. She was a sexpot with talent, and, just as crucially, her feline beauty was a sexpot breed we’d never seen. Past glamazons like Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardner, and Jayne Mansfield trailed a whiff of insecurity. We could sense that they were…
Saoirse Ronan makes a grand case for herself as the Millennial generation’s finest leading lady in Brooklyn, an immaculately crafted, immensely moving character study about a 1950s immigrant struggling to find her place in the world. With an open, innocent countenance equally capable of registering tremulous separation anxiety, exhilarating joy,…
Here’s a sentence you didn’t expect to read today: There’s a recent Simpsons that’s entirely worth your time. Seriously. “Halloween of Horror,” the fourth episode of the series’ 27th season, is a rarity: a late-era Simpsons rich with feeling, sharp jokes and the sense that this family and their story…
In its very first scene, Aziz Ansari’s new Netflix series, Master of None, presents something never before seen on TV: an Asian-American male romantic lead at the center of his own series. Granted, that scene is hardly sexy: A broken condom puts the brakes on a bar hook-up between Dev…
The Muppets doesn’t work, exactly, but I’m still watching. As a relative outsider to the 60-year Muppets franchise, I’ve long suspected that early imprinting is the key to loving Jim Henson’s gaudy, unblinking rags. I’ve never felt a particular need to watch pieces of felt tell Borscht Belt–style jokes, and…
Yes, it’s 3-D computer animation, and yes, it shows us more of the face of Charlie Brown’s Little Red-Haired Girl than you ever thought you would see. But the news, for the most part, is good: The Peanuts Movie is much closer in spirit to Charles Schulz’s half-century comic strip…
Because women are particularly beguiling when viewed from behind, the camera loves to follow them: Anyone who’s watched James Stewart’s lovesick detective trailing Kim Novak, a platinum dream poured into a pale gray flannel hourglass, understands the voyeurism at the heart of Vertigo. With Spectre — the 24th James Bond…
In this month of giving thanks, let’s take a moment and appreciate the movies that make us smile, make us cry, make us cheer, and make us laugh. If you’ll be traveling to see family or hosting them, there’s plenty to see this month that likely won’t even cause an…
Political drama has long been shaped by what we can call the conversion narrative. In a play like One Third of a Nation, one of the Living Newspaper extravaganzas mounted with New Deal funding by the Federal Theatre Project, an everyman Joe you just gotta root for tries to live…
David Gordon Green’s Our Brand Is Crisis is a horror film wrapped in fast-talking political comedy. Watching Sandra Bullock, as ruthless campaign manager Jane, flog her uncharismatic candidate for Bolivia’s next president, I snickered at her knowing quips. Asked by an offscreen TV interviewer (the film’s awkward framing device) to…
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin is the Taiwanese director’s first foray into the martial arts genre. It may also be his most resplendent film yet: Watching it is like floating along on a sumptuous gold-and-lacquer cloud. Hou favorite Shu Qi (who also starred in Millennium Mambo and Three Times) plays Nie…
Before Anthony Bourdain published Kitchen Confidential, in 2000, mere mortals who simply eat in restaurants had little idea about the drinking, debauchery, and drug use rampant among the folks responsible for getting their fettuccine alfredo to the table. The book was eye-opening if true, and a rambunctious, vicarious pleasure even…
Sure, you can blame the aliens, the gophers, the monkeys, and the fridge. But even without all those, 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Harrumphing of the Whatsit likely wouldn’t have worked. Its director, you see, no longer finds it edifying to dream up new ways to kill America’s historical enemies…
We’d encourage you to see as many of the movies at this year’s Scottsdale International Film Festival as you possibly can. Once again, festival director Amy Ettinger has put together a fantastic lineup of intriguing documentaries and narrative films that will challenge, inspire and entertain you. If you have to…
Celebrity memoirs tend to be a carefully curated exercise in name-dropping and selective memory, chronicling a rise to stardom but rarely acknowledging the pitfalls (save for certain addictions). Tend to, but not always. Such is the case with The Bassoon King: My Life in Art, Faith, and Idiocy, a breath…
This Jem is less a movie than an open-source brand launch: If you’re young and down or bullied or disconnected from the life around you, you could always slap on some glitter and film yourself singing as the cartoon-rock queen Jem. Aubrey Pee ples, playing the singer, even gets a…
When Drake premièred his video for “Hotline Bling” through Apple Music on October 19, a lot of things happened. The Internet exploded with memes of his questionable dance moves. The fashion-conscious debated whether chunky knit turtlenecks are poised to make a comeback. And the art world reacted, too. Because the video features…
Critics lampoon him as a fast/furious lug nut, a hunk of well-oiled meat who doesn’t so much act as ka-thunk his face and body through its limited gears. To hell with them. Vin Diesel may not run smoothly, but he runs with purpose and conviction, and any line of dialogue…
In his 2014 book Difficult Men, journalist Brett Martin identifies bad-boy antiheroes as the defining feature of our current “Golden Age” of television. Tony Soprano, Don Draper, and The Wire’s Omar Little dazzle with their multifaceted complexity: How deep the furrow in Tony’s troubled brow! How pensive the trail of…
Quick! Name the movie where Bill Murray plays a proudly shabby dude who acts like a prick for an hour and then, for reasons of narrative convention rather than character-based truth, shambles toward either heroism or some vague be-nicer enlightenment. Maybe a tougher challenge would be to name the Bill…
Aaron Sorkin opens up a new desktop icon with Steve Jobs, a briskly busy, talkative companion piece to the Newsroom and Moneyball writer’s Mark Zuckerberg-centric The Social Network. Adapting Walter Isaacson’s biography of the Apple innovator — and covering much of the same ground as Alex Gibney’s documentary Steve Jobs:…
The most effective scene in James Vanderbilt’s brisk, outraged Truth is one that will be familiar to anyone who has ever sat in a room where editors and reporters are breaking down an investigative story. The reporters — here, 60 Minutes researchers played by Dennis Quaid, Elisabeth Moss, and Topher…
