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…
Adults in 2016 know not to feed the trolls. If you have to, though, you need to come on hard and strong, publicly glutting them on so much truth that they just curl up and die under their bridges/in their comment threads. So it goes in Mick Jackson’s patient, heartening,…
In the nine years since she was first accused of and jailed for murder — then exculpated, only to be retried and found guilty again, and finally absolved — Amanda Knox has learned a thing or two about performance. “Either I’m a psychopath in sheep’s clothing,” the 21st century’s most…
Deepwater Horizon is the most entertaining Hollywood disaster movie in years. I’m sorry — is that a terrible thing to say? Peter Berg’s film is based on the true story of the BP-leased, Transocean-owned deepwater drilling rig that in 2010 exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 souls and…
The first moments of Luke Cage offer much that the previous 38 or so hours of Marvel superhero Netflix drama haven’t: laughter. Warmth. A sense that the New York City that Daredevil and Jessica Jones mope and brawl through might be more than just a place to save — it…
Don’t resist the temptation to take off your 3D glasses while watching the Nick Cave concert doc One More Time With Feeling. Without them, as you watch the images projected atop each other, you can see Cave as something like he envisions himself in this film made after the death…
In American Honey, her 162-minute fourth feature (and the first she’s made in the U.S.), the British director Andrea Arnold sets an infatuation-at-first-sight encounter to Rihanna’s “We Found Love,” a conversation about dreams to Bruce Springsteen singing “Dream Baby Dream” and a moment of camaraderie among itinerant youngsters traveling across…
Every week, we’re recapping season two of Degrassi: Next Class. #TheseAreMyConfessions. Finally, we have an arc worthy of a badass chick like Grace. She’s spent a lot of her time on the show as a rough-and-tumble bad girl caricature and occasional sounding board to people like Zig, Tiny, and Maya. We…
Writer/director Osgood Perkins has been peeking at my Shirley Jackson book collection, and he’s already read through my favorites: The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. His sophomore feature, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, is a magical amalgam of…
In lieu of a traditional title card, Indivisible offers a corker of an opening sequence that begins with three young women walking home from the beach like hungover soldiers in soft morning light until a blue panel van displays the original Italian title: Indivisibili. In between, that trio of up-all-night…
A woman wears sunglasses, a tight red dress, matching long gloves, and red lipstick. She stands and smokes a cigarette, ostensibly watching a rugby game, but really the players are watching her, fumbling their footwork, and it’s exactly the effect she desires. This early scene, with its shifting gazes and…
Look, if you’re not stirred by the sight of Denzel Washington, clad in head-to-toe black, riding a black stallion over dunes and bluffs and right up to the saloon of some two-bit frontier town — well, then maybe the movies just aren’t for you. Washington, of course, strides right into…
