Each week, we’re recapping the second season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt episode by episode. Typically, we talk about these episodes in terms of A, B, and C plots based on their prominence in the episode. But that structure surprisingly doesn’t apply to “Kimmy Sees A Sunset!” Each story here has…
Alex Gibney will be ready if the power grids fail. “We have a place in Maine now,” the director says. “We just installed solar panels. We can fish. We have water. With a little bit of Sterno, we’ll probably be okay.” After a long career dredging up the dark side…
On both an emotional and narrative level, a Hirokazu Kore-eda film pulls you in slowly, almost unexpectedly. The acclaimed Japanese director, whose works include After Life (1998), Still Walking (2008), and Like Father, Like Son (2013), makes movies about things like loss, abandonment, and death, but his distinct touch —…
Sometimes a movie seems like it was more fun to make than it is to watch. Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates is one of those movies. Zac Efron and Adam DeVine are Dave and Mike Stangle, two troublemaking brothers with a knack for walking the tightrope of party-makers/breakers. With…
James DeMonaco’s Purge series, about a near future in which all crime is legal for one annual 12-hour period, began as a disturbing setup for basic genre thrills: 2013’s franchise-starter was essentially a home-invasion thriller with a dystopian twist. By the time Purge: Anarchy rolled around a year later, the…
In one of many throwaway gags in The Secret Life of Pets, a group of dogs gathering for an all-important rescue operation is momentarily sidetracked by a butterfly, which sends them into a riot of leaping and yelping. Pets are easily distracted, you see. And you know who else is…
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…
