Film, TV & Streaming

Here’s what happened.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, written as an original screenplay by author J.K. Rowling, is an expansion of her Harry Potter universe, and a test: Without lovable, adolescent leads Harry, Hermione Grainger, and Ron Weasley, or the elaborate narrative backbone provided by Rowling’s novels, can the wizarding world…

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is a small film burdened with the epic, thanks to both its subject and its setting. Based on Ben Fountain’s 2012 novel, it depicts a day in the life of a young soldier (Joe Alwyn) briefly returning from Iraq to be honored with his squad…

Tom Ford has entirely overstuffed his nesting-doll domestic drama-cum-thriller Nocturnal Animals, and yet I spent much of the film worrying that it might not have a point. Its aesthetic footprint is huge, but its impact decidedly small scale. That’s not always a bad thing; there’s a perverse elegance to so…

Sure, teen comedies make stars of their leading ladies and fellas, but what about the authority figures? Eugene Levy’s nameless dad in American Pie is peripheral but memorable as a bumbly guiding force. Tina Fey’s Ms. Norbury in Mean Girls is a motherly but revelatory mess of a teacher. Harry…

Ben Younger’s workmanlike but nevertheless rousing Bleed for This accomplishes something that’s a tall order for any boxing movie: It makes the inspirational training-montage sequences weird. Those are generally the most requisite and unexciting element of the genre, but Bleed for This freshens them thanks to the strange and disturbing…

The Amazon series Good Girls Revolt, centered on a landmark 1970 gender discrimination case at Newsweek, is the kind of period drama that’s more interested in commenting on the present than recreating the past. The storyline, about professional journalists, plays fast and loose with the facts, and creator Dana Calvo…

It’s fun watching Ginny Baker be rude to people. I was hesitant to give a chance to Pitch, the new Fox series imagining the life and career of the (fictional) first woman to play Major League Baseball, because I feared Ginny would be impossibly noble, driven and hardworking — the…

One day, Denis Villeneuve will make a truly great movie. This is, apparently, a controversial opinion. Many out there feel strongly that the Canadian filmmaker has been leaping from triumph to triumph in recent years — with Sicario, Prisoners and Enemy under his belt — while some consider him a…

Haters Back Off!, a new eight-episode comedy streaming on Netflix, is about putting yourself out there, ignoring the haters, following your dreams no matter who or what stands in your way and utterly humiliating yourself on YouTube. Also at church socials, gay bars, funerals, rest homes — really anywhere Miranda…

Poor Teddy.

There’s a Jimmy Gibbler?!

A question is posed to the main character of Barry Jenkins’ wondrous, superbly acted new film, Moonlight: “Who is you, man?” The beauty of Jenkins’ second feature, which follows his San Francisco-set black-boho romance Medicine for Melancholy (2008), radiates from the way that query is explored and answered: with specifics…

Between The Night Manager, Veep, and now Chance, a new Hulu series adapted from a nasty Kem Nunn novel, Hugh Laurie has had an exceptional year in television. The Hulu program stands out slightly above the rest, considering its resonant dialogue with the Oxford-born Laurie’s most famous role. Like House,…

Boo! A Madea Halloween was the number-one movie over this past weekend, baffling Hollywood once again and making the Hotep crowd pissed that a movie starring a black guy in a dress made more money than alleged rapist Nate Parker’s still-struggling The Birth of a Nation. (Meanwhile, these woke brothas…

At what point do we stop looking at a show like Black Mirror as a sign of things to come and start acknowledging it as a reflection of where we already are? All the Terminators and 2001s in the world couldn’t prevent us from lusting after self-driving cars, asking Siri…

Right now, Disney XD is probably best known for its increasingly relevant Star Wars Rebels series, as well as for being the only cable channel with an emoticon in its name — at least until the inevitable debut of the Trump 🙁 Channel. Disney XD is also on probation with…

It’s too much to ask that a studio money-maker/sequel-generator like Doctor Strange actually be strange, much less flaunt doctoral levels of weirdness. Instead, it’s Strange 101 in super HD, its lavish pop-art psychedelia in service of 1963 comic-book story beats. The attractions this time are Benedict Cumberbatch, haughtily Randian as…

A wall of white and black hats. Terrifying darkness. A woman staggering through a medical facility with her guts ripped open. And always, in the background: the player piano ticking along according to its programming, playing modern-day ballads to the denizens of a future world. Welcome to Westworld, a slick…

I’m not afraid to admit that I get a kick out of Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon thrillers. Yes, they’re indifferently plotted and predictably written. But I’m a sucker for ludicrous, centuries-spanning conspiracies and indulgent faux-gnosticism. The books serve, if nothing else, as gripping tours through art-world apocrypha, and Brown’s know-it-all…

The wooden troll figures that Thomas Dam began carving and selling in the ’50s had a great deal of folklore behind them but no cast of fixed characters. Though the Trolls have since been in TV specials, video games, and a short-lived series, none of those have established what we…

“Are we really in our generation going to allow the biggest mammal on earth to disappear?” asks a conservationist late in Richard Ladkani and Kief Davidson’s propulsive ivory-trade doc. That simple question cuts to the heart in ways that much of this showy, desperately dramatic pseudo-thriller doesn’t. The title is…