If your city’s power grid shuts down this summer, it may be a brownout, or it may be an act of cyber-warfare — a straight-out-of-Hollywood scenario that suddenly seems scarily possible thanks to the labyrinthine story director Alex Gibney tells in his riveting documentary Zero Days. It’s complicated, but know…
Don’t let the publicity photos of the ensemble cast clad in ’70s-era tuxes and flower-child dresses, or even the cloying Mumford-mimicking soundtrack on the trailer, fool you: Captain Fantastic ain’t some twee, cutesy Wes Anderson romp or a Little Miss Sunshine knockoff. This dramedy marking the feature debut of longtime…
In his latest family portrait, Our Little Sister, Hirokazu Kore-eda chronicles roughly a year in the life of the Koda clan — or what’s left of it. When, years ago, her father left for another woman and their mother subsequently abandoned the family to live her own life, Sachi (Haruka…
Each week, we’re recapping the second season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt episode by episode. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt has a taste for extremes. On the one hand, it takes everything to the silliest place it can; we just started to see it explore the process of therapy last week, and now it’s…
So you’re done binge-watching season four of Orange is the New Black, and now you need some help getting your fix? We’re here to help by taking a look back at the best sex scenes of the last few seasons. For those who haven’t finished the most recent episodes, you may…
Very few advance screenings preceded Independence Day: Resurgence’s arrival in theaters on the evening of June 23. That’s eight days ahead of the July 4th weekend that in simpler times — like 1996, when Independence Day was the year’s biggest hit — was traditionally reserved for the biggest, ka-blammiest movie of the…
At their best, Michel Gondry’s movies are sad in a way that makes you not want to be happy. The problem is that Gondry’s best doesn’t extend far beyond Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, that dream-weaving romance from more than a decade back, and scattered moments from subsequent films:…
AMC’s Preacher is a surprisingly sedate creation. It moves at such a glacial pace that you have to wonder if the brain trust behind this adaptation of Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s gonzo ‘90s Vertigo comic — Seth Rogen, Sam Catlin and Evan Goldberg — forgot it only has 10…
If there’s a war movie we haven’t seen enough of yet, it’s one from the female perspective, one that further obscures who the good guys and bad guys really are. In Anne Fontaine’s moody feature The Innocents, even the nuns are gray. During a bitterly cold winter, tucked away in…
Stanley Kubrick once sent his friend John le Carré a letter about why he couldn’t adapt one of the author’s books. “Essentially,” he wrote, “how do you tell a story it took the author 165,000 (my guess) good and necessary words to tell, with 12,000 words (about the number of…
According to IMDb, Jaume Collet-Serra’s over-before-you-know-it The Shallows runs for one hour and 27 minutes — a number that produces a reaction something like when an NBA roster lists a short-looking player at five-foot-nine and you marvel, Really? Nate Robinson is that tall? The shark thriller has only three or…
An unlikely buddy comedy-drama about the friendship between a suicidal castaway played by Paul Dano and a flatulent corpse played by Daniel Radcliffe, Swiss Army Man doesn’t seem like the kind of movie you’d watch with your mother. So what was it like to be the mothers of the film’s…
At last, a Hollywood reimagining with a point. David Yates’ two-fisted pulp-studies spree The Legend of Tarzan doesn’t just update Edgar Rice Burroughs’ white-boy jungle-bro for our age of heightened sensitivities and bit rates. It interrogates the very idea of Tarzan, signing the old sport up for the good fight…
Can Steven Spielberg do comedy? That seems like a dumb question, since nobody has done more to bring wit to the modern blockbuster; Raiders of the Lost Ark and Jaws boast as many laugh-out-loud moments as they do thrills. But those gags are often incidental, of the tension-breaking kind. When…
Going viral guarantees little beyond having your fifteen minutes of fame reuploaded to YouTube in ever diminishing quality, the original video (and its impressive view count) eventually lost to time and/or takedown notices. That makes Unlocking the Truth’s second act as a signed band doubly impressive: The teen group is…
This quietly moving doc has a hook worthy of the most shameless of Hollywood weepies, offering tragedy and a miracle and much ado about the power of movies themselves. But the film is tender and patient, as fascinated by the challenges of daily life as it is by the dramatic…
Summer is the perfect season to catch up on your reading. And it just so happens to coincide with the perfect season for spending an afternoon at the movies. For those who enjoy reading the book before watching the movie, it’s time to make more space on your bookshelf, because…
Each week, we’re recapping the second season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt episode by episode. By the standards of modern television, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt doesn’t brand itself a particularly groundbreaking or boundary-pushing show. Instead, it typically falls into the “fun” and “easy to watch” categories of TV despite its heroine’s dark backstory. But it…
An inevitability as harsh as an Arizona winter, TV show cancellations are upon us. Like the leaves changing or avoiding the flu shot, finding out your favorite show won’t get another season is another annual tribulation. But we have hope, everybody, in the form of sweet, clickable lists such as…
Has Paul Rudd become Hollywood’s idea of the face of economic insecurity? There his handsome mug was, in Ant-Man, beneath a Baskin-Robbins ball cap, his character making do behind an ice-cream counter while Marvel made bank in promotional tie-ins. And now, in The Fundamentals of Caring, Rob Burnett’s alternately winning/cloying…
Let me tell you all the good things about Nicolas Winding Refn’s high-art, lowbrow horror film The Neon Demon before I tell you what I will not tolerate. After Drive, Refn seems obsessed with his idea of Los Angeles, one where there’s always a full moon, no traffic and everyone…
Woodrow Wilson described D.W. Griffith’s notorious Civil War epic Birth of a Nation as “writing history with lightning.” Gary Ross’ Free State of Jones, which covers roughly the same period as Griffith’s film, is more like writing history with index cards. Diligent and informative but also fragmented and inert, it…
