Fred Armisen and Bill Hader are a rarity in the comedy world: funny people with hearts of gold. It was obvious all those years when they were cast members on Saturday Night Live. They handled their characters — whether living, dead or purely fictional — with a visible sweetness. Think…
There’s little in the way of setup or explanation for what the “bad batch” is or how the members of such a motley, unfortunate tribe of humans were banished to a desert wasteland in Ana Lily Amirpour’s post-apocalyptic action dramedy. Instead, Amirpour just lets the camera linger on a sign…
I want to take a moment to apologize to Anne Hathaway. Ms. Hathaway, as you’ve grown from precocious princess (The Princess Diaries) and embattled intern (The Devil Wears Prada) to destitute prostitute (Les Misérables) and back again to Disney royalty (Alice Through the Looking Glass), I’ve sometimes judged you unfairly,…
The month before Fish Tank writer/director Andrea Arnold premiered her film American Honey at this year’s edition of the Cannes Film Festival (where it won the Jury Prize), she spoke before an audience with director Ira Sachs as part of the Tribeca Film Festival. The following are excerpts of her remarks, edited for clarity…
Forgiveness is tricky and personal, and you can’t be blamed for not offering it. Buying a ticket to Nate Parker’s slave-revolt drama The Birth of a Nation demands at least some measure of it. As you’ve probably heard, while a student at Penn State, Parker — the film’s star, director,…
When Relativity Media — the production company/distributor behind Masterminds, the newest vehicle for Zach Galifianakis to do his painfully committed schtick — started getting press, co-founder/co-CEO Ryan Kavanaugh boasted of his secret sauce for success. A proprietary risk-evaluation algorithm that crunched variables like cast, release date, relative examples in the…
Here’s a great example of how not to open your documentary. “After releasing my film in 2012 about marriage equality, I was at a loss of what topic to explore next,” says Cassie Jaye in the halting tones of a hostage reading her captors’ statement to the world. That comes…
They say there’s no accounting for taste, and here to prove it is The Greasy Strangler. A fringe-inhabiting genre provocation destined for a self-selecting audience with strong stomachs, co-writer/director Jim Hosking’s feature-length whatsit tests sensibilities, but Hosking forgets that oddity isn’t a substitute for quality. The film offers a chance…
Outside of dudes killing dudes, there’s little the moviegoers seem to love more than weddings, a truth that Elite Zexer’s heartsick desert drama Sand Storm exploits for a first-act sucker punch. The nuptials that teen Layla (Lamis Ammar) is driving her father Suliman (Hitham Omari) toward, the frame of a…
Voyage of Time: The IMAX Experience might be the most narrative film of Terrence Malick’s career. The enigmatic director’s recent work has been marked by a turn toward elliptical, stream-of-consciousness meditations, pretty much discarding any semblance of conventional storytelling. But going as far back as Badlands (1973), he’s had a…
You might have let yourself act surprised as the waters have risen and the floods have come. But you can’t anymore, not after 13th, Ava DuVernay’s miraculous cine-history of the criminalization of American blackness. Few films shake and astonish like this one, even though nothing in it should be a…
It takes all of two minutes of listening to Emily Blunt’s voice-over in The Girl on the Train before you have to wonder whether this narrator might be unreliable. As her Rachel rides Metro-North in and out of Manhattan, detailing her growing obsession with the ostensibly perfect couple she steals…
Half a century after its debut, The Battle of Algiers has a permanent parking spot in the film canon. After taking home the Golden Lion at the 1966 Venice Film Festival, it was nominated for three Academy Awards (one in 1967 and two in 1969, oddly) and now ranks within…
Mike Judge’s Idiocracy might technically be coming back to theaters for one night only, but for many of us, it’s been running on an endless loop for years. In a world where Donald Trump is a presidential candidate and some cafes are now offering blowjobs with your morning coffee, it’s…
With Gilmore Girls returning to Netflix this November, we figured it was time to take a closer look at the fictional town of Stars Hollow and the many citizens who live there. While the show itself has always focused on Lorelai and Rory Gilmore, the titular girls, the sleepy Connecticut…
Every week, we’re recapping season two of Degrassi: Next Class. Grab a hold for a doozy of a cliffhanger, y’all! As we’ve made abundantly clear in almost all of our recaps, the Degrassi empire wasn’t built on pleasantries and playing it safe. Many of the show’s biggest moments came as…
Recently, I received an e-mail from Jeopardy! telling me that there’s still time to register for the show’s online test, which runs from October 4 through 6 (for details go to jeopardy.com). I get e-mails from the show every now and then, and they always bring up some stinging memories…
For the last five years, American Horror Story has been one of the sexiest (and spookiest) shows on television. Thanks to new cast members, including Emma Roberts and Lady Gaga, AHS has only gotten hotter since we last wrote about its steamiest scenes. But with that extra sexiness comes some…
The road to equal treatment has been a long and difficult one for the disabled community, and littered with setbacks and defeats. Occasionally lost in that quest for accessibility legislation and insurance mandates has been the subordinate struggle to recognize the fact that, yes, the disabled can be assholes, too…
You know those kids who didn’t give a shit about fashion or football but piled onto beanbags in the basement every Friday to watch the freakiest low-budget camp horror comedies and psychedelic vintage animations on bootleg VHS procured via mail order from some dude they met at a rock show…
One of the benefits of services like Netflix and Amazon Prime is that they allow TV stars, liberated from the confines of network television and cable, to try something new, expand their reach, or otherwise kick it up a notch. In Amazon’s Eat the World, for example, Emeril Lagasse, the…
The conventional wisdom about early-career Tim Burton is that he was an imaginative visual stylist but not a great storyteller. That sounds smart, right? It’s still something that a certain kind of ratty-beard-stroking film critic keeps tucked in his sweater vest in case he needs to say something that sounds…
