Like the real 1980s, Stranger Things gets more unsettling as it goes. The opening episode of the Netflix show, created by the Duffer Brothers, gives us swear-y, scruffy kids playing D&D and then, beneath a lavish suburban starscape, encountering the unknown — which one of the boys promptly hides in…
Does it matter that Freddy Krueger was a pedophilic middle-school janitor who died in a blazing fire when parents sought revenge? No. And unless you’re a horror-film obsessive, you probably don’t even know how he morphed into a pizza-faced Where’s Waldo with knife fingers — what matters is he lives…
To understand what Absolutely Fabulous (first a TV show and now a movie) means to Brits, you’d have to go back to the TV premiere in 1992. Margaret Thatcher had their economy in a stranglehold until her departure as Prime Minister two years earlier, and when every sensible citizen was…
Catherine Corsini’s lovely, sultry Summertime, a 1971-set tale about two women of different ages and class backgrounds who fall in love, celebrates erotic abandon but never loses its mind. Unlike Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013), France’s most notorious treatment of a sapphic sentimental education, Corsini’s movie, which…
Star Trek Beyond might be the Star Trekkiest film of the new, J.J. Abrams-ified Trek era. That is to say, it’s the one that feels the most like a turbo-loaded episode of the original series, and has at least some of that classic spirit of exploration and derring-do. That’s not…
We’re recapping Difficult People, episode by episode. The answer to that word jumble is Ingrid BERGMAN. Difficult People debuted its second season on Hulu this week with not one but two episodes. So hi, adoring public, here’s your second Diff-P recap of the week. This time around, Billy and Julie face…
Summer escapes to the multiplex are a time-honored tradition in the Valley, but you can add a little more charm this year by actually getting out of town to the Prescott Film Festival starting on Sunday, July 17. Now in its seventh year, the week-long festival runs until Sunday, July…
Each week, we’re recapping the second season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt episode by episode. “Kimmy Finds Her Mom!” marks the end of the second season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and it has a high standard to meet, as the final episodes of season one depicting the Reverend’s trial remain probably the…
Underneath the flurry of sequined panda bear masks, butterfly wings, actual monkey suits, and lamé capes of Mexico’s beloved wrestlers, there are lives at stake, portrayed with varying degrees of success in Lucha Mexico. The documentary opens at FilmBar on Friday, July 15, playing only twice, and also at Sonora Cinemas,…
A while back I cracked a dumb joke about all our presidential candidates being corrupt. My wife hit back with this: “You’re a JibJab!” She referred, of course, to the animated viral sensations of America circa 2005 or 2008, the once wildly popular political-parody videos that, in the interest of…
In the world of Difficult People, the cutting comedy returning this week to Hulu, the game is rigged against Julie (Julie Klausner) and Billy (Billy Eichner), but perhaps only because they rigged it against themselves. As their friends find success, the two struggling comedians feign interest in jobs that pay…
We’re recapping Difficult People, episode by episode. Come sit with us as we atrophy and wither. “So this is what a gym looks like,” Julie says, scooping her way through a sundae while walking by a rock-climbing wall. So we begin season two of Difficult People in a place designed for…
Here’s a story you might have missed a few weeks back, what with the country collapsing. In late June, at Dallas’ Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center, 30 aspirational souls received burn treatment after walking over hot coals at a Tony Robbins seminar. Robbins, a seize-your-life salesman of granite physique and…
Kindly allow this lengthy aside and conspiracy theorizing: I can’t start my review of Paul Feig’s redo of Ghostbusters without first mentioning the stupefying chaos that attended last Thursday evening’s press screening, the only one of two scheduled a half-hour apart in New York before the movie’s opening. This unprecedented…
Is it possible to sustain a feature in a single interior location with the premise that three outlaws on the run may or may not rape the three women of the house, two of whom are already being molested by their father? I mean, you could. But why the hell…
Bob Mazur, in his bestselling memoir, sounds like any of us when we shift careers, writing that he wanted something that “kept my interest, that didn’t box me into the same boring routine.” The only difference is that Mazur didn’t break the box quitting an ad job to launch a…
The futuristic dystopia of the arty sci-fi romance Equals will be familiar to anyone who’s seen the likes of Gattaca, The Island or THX 1138. It’s a cool, rational, lifeless world, blanketed in whites and grays and blues, and peopled with unfeeling faces — a world whose citizens will express…
Café Society is surprisingly ambitious by the standards of late-period Woody Allen — a veritable epic taking in a broad swath of a young man’s life and charting his progress from wide-eyed innocent to cold, confident operator. But that’s also why the film, in some senses, could only have been…
It’s no secret that some documentary films are either partly or largely staged. Think of Errol Morris’s re-enactments; think of the fake archival footage in Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell; think of documentary granddad Robert Flaherty casting and concocting scenarios for Nanook of the North. That these strategies can also…
Few of us live our lives in widescreen. Instead, the frames in which our days play out tend to be tight and personal, the vistas only occasional. We see what we need to, what’s before us, what we actually inhabit. That truth has long been the source of a distracting…
Viewers complaining that a protagonist isn’t “likable” usually mean something more like “the protagonist doesn’t stir my empathy” — after all, audiences adore cozying up to scripted TV’s fascinating creeps. Winning that empathy demands that writers, directors and actors lay bare their characters’ selves, immersing us in their perspectives, engaging…
Here’s some good news: Netflix is now streaming Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. No other TV show is quite so ambitious or politically deft as star and executive producer Rachel Bloom’s (and co-creator Aline Brosh McKenna’s) darkly comic, whip-smart send-up of romantic comedies. The title alone has turned more than one of my…
