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…
Hell or High Water sees a Scottish director making a down-home, West Texas-set movie about cars, guns, brothers, banks, and twist-off beers. But this outsider’s perspective is nothing new for David Mackenzie, who has worked with Ashton Kutcher and Anne Heche on a Los Angeles romance about a gigolo (2009’s…
Come summer, good TV can be hard to find. By now, you’re probably done with Orange is the New Black and waiting for September to arrive — along with most of the network shows. You might think the TV landscape looks dire right about now, but you’d be wrong. Here are five…
Every week, we’re recapping season two of Degrassi: Next Class. Be the best! The best that you can be! Episode two begins on a hopeful note, especially compared to the chaos that went down in the première. We see Hunter standing outside Chez Hollingsworth, gussied up for his first day back at…
Arizona State University swimmer Katarina Simonovic will fulfill her Olympic dream this month in Brazil. The 21-year-old Serbian national record holder will swim both the 200- and 400-meter freestyle at the 2016 Rio Olympic Games, where she’ll compete on August 7 and 8. Becoming an Olympic swimmer has been a…
Among the ongoing freak-outs of getting older is constantly being confronted with venerable anniversaries of pop-culture phenomena. One week you’re reminded that Star Trek is about to qualify for AARP, another that Jaws is in its 40s, another that Jurassic Park is in its 20s. It can make you feel…
We’re recapping Difficult People, episode by episode. Bless your wooden head. There is an episode of Seinfeld called “The Jimmy” that you might not remember. It’s not a rerun standby. Partly because it’s offensive, arguably. And partly because it offers one of the show’s most biting social commentaries. It’s about how…
When we binge-watched The Hills earlier this year, among all the perspective and life lessons, the resounding theme was, “man, you couldn’t pay me to be in my early 20s again.” Rotating relationships, silly squabbles and the uncertainty of everything you’re experiencing for the first time. Now, imagine then that…
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, published in 1943, might stand as a children’s classic, but it’s not-so-secretly a story for grown-ups. Kids have long been drawn to the book’s dreamy sense of wonder, to the golden-haired star-child of the title, but Saint-Exupéry’s ruminations on regret, solitude and loss belong…
You can have your houses of cards, your Jessica Joneses, your wet hot American summers. The Netflix original with its finger firmest on the pulse of our fraught current moment? It comes from Germany, comprises three feature-length “episodes,” and commences its tale more than a quarter-century ago. NSU: Germany History…
