Writer/director Angela Robinson’s Professor Marston and the Wonder Women is achingly normal, in a good way. Robinson has proven herself capable of melding her sincere and often endearingly campy sensibilities to any cinematic style — spy spoofs (D.E.B.S.), Disney family flicks (Herbie: Fully Loaded), comic-dramas (The L Word), sexy vampire…
America may be crumbling, but here’s at least one truth that might be cheering: They’ve finally figured out biopics. Ever since Walk Hard kicked its ass, that hokiest, flabbiest, most hilariously reductive of movies genres has become, like horror, the rare genre where the studios allow filmmakers to take risks,…
Spielberg premieres Oct. 7 on HBO.
BoJack Horseman streams on Netflix It’s not a huge surprise that my sensitive and kind-hearted spouse could be left sobbing by an episode of a popular TV show. She’d say herself that she’s an easy mark, TV showrunners. But it’s definitely a surprise when any show even tries. TV writers…
Let me set the record straight: Dolores Huerta created the rally cry “Si se puede,” otherwise known as “Yes we can.” If you’ve only ever seen the 2014 film Cesar Chavez — about the legendary farmworkers union president — or watched an Barack Obama campaign speech, you may have thought…
“This was the first time I ate food from a garbage can,” says the documentarian Nanfu Wang some 10 minutes into I Am Another You, an excellent, intuitive study of American wanderlust. We see her doing just what she’s described, as she’s handed off her camera to the 22-year-old street…
With its cast of Kate Winslet and Idris Elba, its original non-franchise source material, its adult concerns and utter lack of superheroics, Hany Abu-Assad’s The Mountain Between Us stands as the kind of movie that grown-ups I know often say they wish the studios would make — and then tend…
The recipe for a perfect Christmas horror film — think the 1974 classic Black Christmas or 2010’s more arty, Finnish offering Rare Exports — calls for dark humor, at least one scene of bright red blood on snow, some kind of creepy Christmas toy or ornament, and a healthy dollop…
Still trudging through the blasted desertscape of the mind 33 years after Paris, Texas, Harry Dean Stanton hoofs along beneath the opening titles of Lucky, his richly aimless swan song, past cacti and scrub brush, the sparseness of the landscape suggesting something of the lead’s drift of mind. Stanton’s Lucky,…
Gerald’s Game premiered on Netflix on September 29. One of the most hilarious things I’ve ever seen on television comes early in The Langoliers, a 1995 ABC miniseries adapted by Tom Holland from a Stephen King novella. It’s the one about a small group of travelers waking up on a…
If I could sum up my experience this week at the Austin-based genre film festival Fantastic Fest in a word, it would be “exhausting.” In years past, that complete physical and mental breakdown might come mostly from the mind-blowing cinema and rowdy events of the festival, but now it is…
Out of the eighty-two feature films at Fantastic Fest this year, eleven were directed by women, and four of those were co-directed by a man. For the slow in math, that means women directed only about 13 percent, which is pretty dismal, though on par with Cannes and 8 percent…
iIf there’s one thing the Japanese genre filmmakers whose work turns up at U.S. festivals tend to nail, it’s masterfully creating a sense of inescapable existentialist dread. At this year’s Fantastic Fest, two films bummed me out beautifully — a nice distraction from the ugly bum-out of the all the…
It’s October, which means it’s time to retire from outdoor life and fully settle into the fall premiere schedule. And because it’s 2017, that means there are about a bazillion new and returning shows, so I sorted through the deluge to bring you the most intriguing ones. I swear, writing…
Lording over the colonies is all bore and bother for the queen in Stephen Frears’ sumptuous yet centerless Victoria & Abdul. The film dramatizes Queen Victoria’s spirited friendship with Abdul Karim, a charming clerk from northern India who — in this telling — jolts the Empress of India from her…
Please accept what follows as a considered statement, arrived at through observation and experience, and not as film-review hype or boilerplate: Kate Mulleavy and Laura Mulleavy’s Woodshock is the rare drug movie that, as you watch it, if you surrender to it, stirs the sensations of having taken drugs. I’m…
April Wolfe is reporting for us from the Toronto International Film Festival. Dictators are a certain kind of selfish, insecure insanity made manifest, and if you’re going to study them, Joseph Stalin is a good place to start. “Stalin” wasn’t even his real name. When he was 30, he changed…
April Wolfe is reporting for us from the Toronto International Film Festival. I’d gone into the theater knowing nothing of the Chloe Zhao’s The Rider except that my colleague Bilge Ebiri adored it — and that I’d get to to witness some breathtaking cinematography capturing the dusky pastels streaking the…
L.A. Weekly film critic April Wolfe is reporting for us from the Toronto International Film Festival. Filmmaking is not a poor man’s game. Even as digital cameras get cheaper, making a festival-worthy film still requires dough to get off the ground, which means the folks who tell stories through cinema…
LA Weekly film critic April Wolfe is reporting for us from the Toronto International Film Festival. Writer-director Dee Rees is breaking all the rules with her third feature, Mudbound. In film school, they tell you, “No voiceovers,” yet this film about two WWII and post-war Mississippi families — one black, one…
LA Weekly film critic April Wolfe is reporting for us from the Toronto International Film Festival. The documentary section of TIFF has a reputation for programming the types of films that can easily compete for audience attention with the narrative juggernauts, and this year is no different. From Agnes Varda’s wacky…
American Made is a Tom Cruise movie worthy of its leading man.
