Film, TV & Streaming

Romantic comedies seem to have soured more than most movie genres. It could be due to their insistence on happy endings, or perhaps it’s the rigid structure that demands easily avoidable conflict followed by the protagonist breathlessly chasing down his or her true love just in time for the end…

James Baldwin passed away in 1987. Well, that’s partially true. He indeed succumbed to stomach cancer at age 63, but most of his life essence remained, via his books and essays deconstructing American culture. Filmmaker Raoul Peck (Lumumba, Sometimes in April) has been a Baldwin devotee since reading The Fire…

Like Ava DuVernay’s 13th, Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro travels a straight, well-researched path from the darkest tragedies of American history to the ones that plague the country today. Both films filter African-American life through the prism of the societal construct called race, but while DuVernay’s dissertation focuses…

Boundaries are violated repeatedly in Fifty Shades Darker, a film that demands even more submission of its audience than its predecessor, 2015’s Fifty Shades of Grey. No safeword can protect you from the sequel’s depleting incoherence, its punishing pileup of plot, and its inability to successfully stage, even once, the…

Given that it’s a sequel/spinoff built around a mostly throwaway gag in The LEGO Movie, The LEGO Batman Movie is funnier than you might think it has any right to be. But those of us who were expecting something more can’t help but feel a twinge of disappointment. The LEGO…

Contemporary American horror’s obsession with morality and psychotherapy can really be a downer. In 2002, Gore Verbinski expertly remade the J-horror hit Ringu with a layered story about a single mother (Naomi Watts) who watches a cursed videotape. To stop the curse, she travels through the warped psyche of the…

First, the good news: The dog doesn’t die in John Wick: Chapter 2. This will come as a relief to some of us who adored the original, an action masterpiece about a retired hitman taking unholy revenge on the Russian scumbags who killed his pup and stole his car. The…

We made it to February! Hooray us! Hey, it wasn’t a guarantee, and I’m so proud of us all. As a reward, make sure to watch every single one of these TV shows this month, and I don’t want to hear any excuses! You deserve it. The Quad (BET), Feb…

A handy guide.

Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman is a tense, visceral drama of wounded masculinity — and therein lies part of its problem. Farhadi, whose About Elly and A Separation are two of the greatest movies of the past decade, can find tension in the most mundane of exchanges, and he…

Take it from the network that rebranded as Syfy: The best trick in The Magicians is its phoniness. The actors share a broad house-style stiltedness and uniform, plasticine good looks — even the same haircut. The sets, costumes, and special effects, while often inventive (a baddie with a head made…

In October of last year, in southwestern Kansas, three members of a militia called “The Crusaders” were arrested and charged with planning to blow up an apartment complex in tiny Garden City housing 120 Somali immigrants. According to Tom Beall, the Acting U.S. State’s Attorney, one defendant had said that…

In his atmospheric debut film, Australian theater director Simon Stone whittles down The Wild Duck into a cautionary tale about welcoming home an emotional exile. While stage adaptations of Henrik Ibsen’s tragicomedy often emphasize its farcical elements, Stone sticks to tragedy in his naturalistic version, set in densely planted logging…

The title offers the first clue about what’s off. Calling this movie The Comedian suggests that Robert De Niro will be playing something definitive or archetypal, as if there’s just one kind of stand-up comic, as if he’s representing a genus rather than embodying someone singular. A glut of other…