The July 2011 death of Amy Winehouse at age 27, was one of the first great tragedies of 21st-century pop music, an event — like the deaths of Tupac Shakur and Kurt Cobain in the last decade of the 20th — that emphasized the jarring contrast between the fragility of…
Young Frankenstein We can’t get over the fact that Mel Brooks wrote the words and music to all of the songs in the stage musical version of Young Frankenstein (except for “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” or, as the monster sings it, “Oo atha Rih”). Dude is mad talented – he…
There’s no one right way to show mental illness in the movies, yet there are hundreds of ways to get it wrong. Even though certain disorders come with specific traits, a diagnosis is not a human being, and doomed is the actor who just cycles through symptoms, rather than working…
After 12 years on the air, The Daily Show With Jon Stewart became required viewing during the Dubya years, when much of the nation was desperate to look to almost anyone else for political leadership. The Comedy Central series offered nightly catharsis in five- or eight-minute bursts, voicing the anger and…
A romance about wanting to see a romance, a comic tragedy about an onlooker willing something tragic, Anne Fontaine’s Flaubert-inspired meta-pleasure Gemma Bovery takes as its subject the act of watching the lives around us — and of wishing those lives were literature. Or films: Here’s a French film thick…
Mia Hansen-Løve’s lucid and shimmering movie memoir Eden traces the sloping rise and even more meandering fall of a French techno DJ across some 20 years. Eden isn’t even about anything as broad as electronic dance music: It deals largely with the specific techno subgenre known as garage — at…
When it’s this hot outside, the question isn’t which movie/s should you see, it’s which movies should you see multiple times to avoid being outside. Even a bad movie is better than braving the raging inferno that we call home this time of year, but we’ve also rounded up some…
Steven Soderbergh’s 2012 Magic Mike was a tease. The ads tempted audiences with sweaty chests and thrusting crotches, but after Soderbergh lured us in to his all-male strip club, he turned on the lights to show us the squalor. His hunks were drugged and morally decayed. The women — the…
Five films into the franchise, Terminator: Genisys feels like a VHS cassette that’s been rewound and recorded over for 31 years. Director Alan Taylor (of the unmemorable Thor: The Dark World) gives us images — a thumbs-up, an abandoned factory, a liquid-metal cop smashing through the windshield of a car…
Even within the strictest formulas of today’s superhero-driven Hollywood, the experienced craftsman with a genuine enthusiasm for the form can find precious moments that are able to accommodate his or her personality. One such example is the director Boaz Yakin, who, following a pair of personal indies (1994’s Fresh and…
Some movies are indefensible, and Ted 2 is one of them. Not only is this a movie about a libidinous, foul-mouthed stuffed bear; it’s the sequel to an earlier movie about a libidinous, foul-mouthed stuffed bear. But I laughed and laughed at Ted 2 — as I did at the…
Crystal Moselle’s documentary The Wolfpack is a Manhattan fable about fear. Two decades ago, a Hare Krishna, conspiracy theorist, and self-described god named Oscar Angulo moved from Peru to a public housing tenement on the Lower East Side with his American bride, Susanne, whom he’d met and wooed on the…
No one recognized Rick Famuyiwa when he strolled up to the Ladera Park basketball courts on a bright weekday afternoon. In January, the lanky, 41-year-old director’s new comedy, Dope — a crowd-pleasing high school flick about nerds who dress like Kid ‘N Play, dream of going to Harvard and bash…
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl may not be the best teen cancer weepie ever made, if there even is a best teen cancer weepie. But it’s surely the most adorable, for better or worse — less like The Fault in Our Stars and more like Diary of a Wimpy…
Part of what makes writer-director Rick Famuyiwa’s Dope so fresh and joyous is that in many key ways it’s not new at all. Here’s a dramatic teen comedy, flavor-crystaled with sex and drugs and innocent raunch, about good friends who get caught up in bad business on their way to…
Of course a 2015 Joe Dante horror-comedy would be some kind of throwback. The Gremlins director has spent a career idealizing the creature-feature jollies of his youth, jolting audiences with wittily vicious nostalgia. Dante’s goofy monster movies have always been more toothy than their antecedents — more technically accomplished, fully…
The first time we cry, as a newborn, might be the purest emotion we ever feel. We sob — a raw mess of tears and terror — and a big human rushes to give comfort. Mentally, the connection is made: My feelings trigger a response, be it hugs or milk…
Prison life is reliably repetitive, but conditions can be frighteningly unstable, too. Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black, which returns June 12 for its third season, reflects that paradoxical state of affairs by delivering more of the same — heartfelt but complicated relationships, inspired capers, compelling personalities, stomach-twisting flips in…
In Jurassic World, Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic Park reboot — set 22 years after dinosaurs started walking the Earth, again — brontosauruses, stegosauruses, and velociraptors have become old hat, sort of like the mechanical Abe Lincoln at Disneyland. Meanwhile, the habitat around them has gone Vegas: Isla Nublar, home of the…
How convinced you’ll be by Soaked in Bleach, the latest vehicle for the Kurt-was-murdered theory the private investigator Tom Grant has now megaphoned for two decades, will hinge on how plausible you find its portrait of the Nirvana frontman approaching his end. The film insists that Cobain, far from the…
Twenty years back, at the height of the UFO boom, the truest believers in alien abduction scenarios would argue that their most compelling evidence was the commonalities between regular people’s stories of nighttime visitations. Even under hypnosis, “abductees” testified to remarkably consistent waking-dream terrors: an alert immobility, shadowed and mostly…
You may not have a summer break like you did when you were a kid, but that doesn’t mean you have to be a grown up at the movies. Let’s save the art house fare and thought-provoking movies for later this year. For June, it’s all about being a kid…
