Remember how The Grinder was canceled and it shouldn’t have been? That sucked. And to make matters worse, a bunch more shows weren’t canceled that definitely should have been. There are more than enough hours and channels in existence that the shit easily outnumbers more entertaining programming, but some of…
Every week, we’re recapping season two of Degrassi: Next Class. You wanna pizza this? The Degrassi empire is impressive not only because of its multi-decade run, but also the amount of students with significant storylines during their time walking those hallowed halls. Each year, students come and go, and those…
In a summer of disappointing reboots, underperforming sequels and rejected franchise bait, Ben-Hur is something rare: a remake no one asked for but weary moviegoers might accept as a small gift for lack of any better option. Timur Bekmambetov’s reimagining of William Wyler’s 1959 epic, itself preceded by two silent…
We’re recapping Difficult People, episode by episode. Hey, you look homeschooled! It’s been slow going for Billy and Julie on season two of Difficult People. Between the two, they’ve failed at resolutions not to have anonymous sex at the gym, killed Nathan Lane, kept their porn to themselves, pretended to…
The Bronx is burning in the introductory episodes of The Get Down, Netflix’s new series that presents as urban-cinematic fable the genesis of rap. The cluttered, over-caffeinated 90-minute pilot, directed by creator and executive producer Baz Luhrmann, takes place in the summer of 1977, when a serial killer terrorized New…
Once, American comedies concerned underdog heroes who challenged the status quo and seized the territory of the upper-class characters who thought they were in control. Slobs vs. snobs. During the wartime administration of the lesser President Bush, the wealthy thoroughly dominated the culture, occupying America the way the army patrolled…
From its opening image — of a distraught woman battling massive ocean waves on a moonlit night — to its surprisingly ambiguous final shot — of what, I won’t say — Kubo and the Two Strings sears itself into your brain. The stop-motion animation studio Laika has perfected, over the…
Baseball is boring. And I’m saying this as someone who loves and plays the game, as someone who’s watched all of Ken Burns’ Baseball and as someone who agrees with Red Barber that “Baseball is dull only to dull minds” — we’re all gonna be a little dull in a…
Natalie Portman proves herself a filmmaker of intelligence, ambition, and inventiveness in her debut as a director and writer — just not one who is always certain as a storyteller. A Tale of Love and Darkness adapts, with a passionate somberness, several threads from Amos Oz’s autobiographical novel of the…
Hey. Do you guys remember puppet comedian Jeff Dunham, whose downtrodden Mexican “on a steeeek” character José Jalapeño delighted many a middle-class white American in the ’90s? Well, imagine he blazed up a joint with Bill Maher, wrote a manifesto on atheism and then made a multimillion-dollar animated feature film…
The central conceit of Imperium — Daniel Radcliffe playing an FBI agent who goes undercover as a white supremacist — is laughable, and the film, to its credit, knows this. Harry Potter as a skinhead? Don’t worry, that’s all part of the plan. Well, maybe. Writer/director Daniel Ragussis tries to…
In contemporary film, it’s typical for an African American character to be the sole person of color in the story, only existing to reveal hidden racism or make white people uncomfortable with themselves. Black characters rarely get to talk to other black characters. Last year, Manohla Dargis suggested a new…
Late in Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World, his unsurprisingly wry, quizzical documentary survey on life inside and beside the virtual world, Werner Herzog stumps two brain researchers with a lyrical question in that instantly recognizable (and often parodied) German accent: “Does the internet dream of itself?” An ever-adventurous…
Michael German went undercover with white supremacists for a year and with right-wing militants for another eight months, and now he wants to set some things straight. “One of the things I learned working undercover is that the studies that the FBI or even academia had on these groups were…
Every week, we’re recapping season two of Degrassi: Next Class. Now, who do we have to pay to make the Brown Cloud app a real thing? The Degrassi students have had a rough time these first few episodes of the season. Racism, mental illness, break-ups . . . and that…
We’re recapping Difficult People, episode by episode. Make a wish. Let’s get ready to rum… do the best we can! So reads the banner in the high school gym where Difficult People’s “36 Candles” opens. Think of it as our roadmap for the episode. Arthur is competing in a PBS versus NPR…
Cities, like young people, are forever becoming something new. The latest tender charmer from Ira Sachs chronicles the growing pains of teens and Brooklyn with the wry sensitivity and eye for economic reality that distinguished Sachs’ Love Is Strange (2014) and Keep the Lights On (2012), which began a sort…
Do we call Anthropoid a thriller? Sean Ellis’ earnest, day-ruining WWII bullet-a-thon is rooted in fact but comes on like pulp fiction in its first reels, hitting secret-mission story beats old enough to have served in the big war. As freedom fighters Josef (Jamie Dornan) and Jan (Cillian Murphy) skulk…
In 2014, Missouri passed a law that requires women to wait at least 72 hours between an initial doctor’s appointment and having an abortion. Today, Missouri is one of the hardest states in the country in which to obtain the procedure. That’s great news for anti-choicers. But for Amie, a…
Most war movies try to shock us with hard, brutal, tangible, sick-making images, demanding that we look at the visible proof — the blood and guts and other gore — that results from guns and bombs. In the searching, cogent Neither Heaven nor Earth, director Clément Cogitore examines the horrors…
Stephen Frears’ Florence Foster Jenkins is a likable study of delusions of grandeur. Working from real-life material, Frears creates an alternately funny and mysterious portrait of someone whom most viewers either don’t know at all or regard as an odd footnote in musical history. We first see Florence (Meryl Streep)…
Ben Kingsley has spoken many words of wisdom in his lifetime, few more insightful than when he told the Observer earlier this summer that, when a male actor is directed by a woman, he “is almost given permission to be vulnerable.” In Alice Winocour’s new feature, Disorder, which lays bare…
