Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’s disparate obsessions form an unwieldy constellation, like a winged horse with three eyes and a blobfish for a tail. Tina Fey’s Netflix comedy mines one-liners from doomsday cults, parenthood, the gig economy, 1990s pop culture, feminine accommodation and the Upper East Side’s gold-toilet elite. The only constant…
It might be surprising to realize that David Lynch has only ever made one period piece: The Elephant Man (1980), set in the Victorian era. The rest of the director’s films, save for his 1984 sci-fi disaster Dune, take place in what presumably is the here and now. Or, more…
The tagline for David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006), which he has avowed is his final film, is a four-word fragment: “a woman in trouble.” However simple, the phrase hypnotically evokes the sinister, insoluble mysteries that have been at the core of many of his ten features and especially in Twin…
Yes, there’s spoilers below for this unspoilable show. “Don’t let yourself be hurt this time,” sings Julee Cruise on “Falling,” the plushly minimalist 1989 synth ballad that, a year later, stripped of its vocal and lyrics, would become the opening theme for Twin Peaks. David Lynch himself wrote that lyric,…
Where are the goddamned roles for Diane Lane? Since her career launched, with a starring role as a precocious 13-year-old American girl in Paris in 1979’s A Little Romance, Lane seems to have confounded casting directors: Is she the button-nosed embodiment of joie de vivre or the anarchist post-punk tempest…
If nothing else, Alien: Covenant is the most ambitious Alien film ever made. It’s almost as if Ridley Scott, foiled in his recent attempts at biblical epics, metaphysical dramas and thorny psychosexual thrillers, decided to revisit those genres under cover of a prized franchise sequel. That’s not to suggest that…
Despite my fondness for Quentin Tarantino, I’ve never been a Reservoir Dogs fan. Back in 1992, the writer-director’s feature debut seemed to me little more than a clever and grotesquely violent one-act play, gussied up with structural whimsy. Yes, the opening scene — black-suited crooks bantering about Madonna and the…
Chris Gethard, the comedian and talk-show host, has the look of his own comic-strip avatar. Those black glasses, that elfin, upright forelock, the eyebrows that dance in alarm and amazement: Onstage, in his one-man show, Career Suicide, Gethard could be Charles Schulz’s sketch of Chris Gethard, a work of cartoon…
In 2008, the National Academy of Sciences saw an opening for outreach: Get real science in the movies. And by November of that year, it had begun the Science and Entertainment Exchange, which offered a way for Hollywood to link up with scientists to advise and consult on projects. Dr…
The true heart of Michael Mann’s Heat is revealed a little more than an hour into the film. No, I’m not talking about the classic coffee conversation between Robert De Niro’s master thief, Neil McCauley, and Al Pacino’s obsessed LAPD cop, Vincent Hanna — that fantastic and immortal face-off comes…
Michael Mann’s 1995 masterpiece, Heat, comes out this week in a brand-new, fully loaded and beautiful Blu-ray edition. To explore further what makes this epochal crime drama so special, I recently talked to the director. The story of Heat was based on real-life personalities. There was real thief named Neil…
I Love Dick streams on Amazon starting Friday, May 12 I Love Dick, the epistolary novel, is an obsessive confessional story from a woman — a version of the author Chris Kraus — who, in her letters, lusts for an English art critic named Dick. He barely returns the affection…
There was never any doubt about the thoughtfulness with which Aziz Ansari, in the first season of his Netflix series, Master of None, addressed the kinds of societal divides — racial, cultural, generational, sexual — that most sitcoms either lack the vision to perceive at all or take on only…
Newly restored, James Ivory’s elegant and passionate 1987 film, Maurice, adapted from the posthumously published novel by E.M. Forster, is being rereleased. Last year, I had the chance to discuss this film and some of Ivory’s other works with the director. Here is some of our conversation. I remember the…
Heavyweight almost-champ Chuck Wepner was a character long before he inspired Sylvester Stallone to pen Rocky. But Wepner is no Rocky Balboa. Sure, he comes from a working-class town (Bayonne, New Jersey), and when he boxed, he took a good punch, bled like a hemophiliac and dreamed of taking home…
A comedy, and also a tragedy, of remarriage — without couples counseling or divorce — writer-director Azazel Jacobs’ The Lovers revitalizes its genre with a piquant premise: What happens when long-wedded spouses, each with a romantic partner outside their dormant dyad, find the spark reignited — a combustion that results…
After The Fate of the Furious premiered, talk of that franchise’s ever slicker, more over-the-top future turned to the promise (and hope) of F&F jumping the shark right into space. But what if … it was already there? And it was named, instead, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2? In…
Steve Coogan is at a fancy dinner, but he’s not doing any Michael Caine impressions. Instead, he’s brooding with resentment of his workaholic congressman brother, Stan (Richard Gere), and grappling with the realization that his son might be a psychopath. It’s all supposed to be harrowing, and the British comedian…
A sleepy earnestness both ennobles and afflicts Ricardo de Montreuil’s fathers-and-sons story, Lowriders. At first the film plays as a low-key corrective, a Hollywood drama with name producers (Brian Grazer, Jason Blum) that, outside a couple of tutorial info-dumps covering cultural basics, presents East Los Angeles lives like pretty much…
King Arthur is neither Guy Ritchie’s worst film nor his best, but it might well be his most frustrating. A compendium of all the things that make the British director so occasionally exciting and so often irritating, this new, hyper-stylized take on the Arthurian legends veers between genius and idiocy…
“I am garbage,” Amy Schumer’s Emily Middleton, on a vacation in Ecuador with her ma, Linda (Goldie Hawn), that’s gone all wrong, chimes in agreement with someone who’s leveled the insult at her — and who’s also holding the two women for ransom — in Snatched. Your enjoyment of this…
A committed (and controversial) performance from Elle Fanning as a high school kid born Ramona — but identifying as Ray — is diced up and short-shrifted in this muddled comedy-drama. The title suggests the chief trouble: Director and co-writer Gaby Dellal’s attention is divided among three generations, with Ray’s mother…
