Each week, we’re recapping season two of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt episode by episode. Perhaps it was only a matter of time until Tina Fey appeared again in her own sitcom. She showed up near the end of last season as the attorney in the case against the Reverend in a…
Lisa Hanawalt wears a lot of hats — or, more accurately, outfits, some of which she may have designed herself. She’s an artist, illustrator, James Beard award-winning food columnist (Lucky Peach), ceramicist, textile and apparel designer, and animation producer and designer (Bojack Horseman), and co-hosts a podcast (Baby Geniuses) with…
The white-dude detective of Nordic best-sellers bears a burden other crime-solvers don’t. Besides his personal troubles — he’s usually a sauced mope estranged from his family — and the challenges of his case-cracking and victim-saving, he is also called upon to reassure readers that the rottenness he sees each day…
Finding Nemo may have been a cartoon about a clownfish traveling across the ocean looking for his son, but it was also one of Pixar’s first overt forays into the workings of the human mind. The film, from 2003, was haunted by loss: The protagonist, Marlin (voiced by Albert Brooks),…
Dylan Reeve and David Farrier’s Tickled might be the oddest documentary you’ll see this year. It starts off with Farrier, a New Zealand TV reporter specializing in human-interest fare, discovering the world of Competitive Endurance Tickling — in which teams of strapping young men tickle each other for extended periods…
In a stark white room, four boys huddle on a mattress, addressing the camera. They’re athletic, the picture of youth and every Abercrombie & Fitch catalog. A blond boy says, “We want to thank Jane O’Brien Media for this opportunity,” and they all smile and wave. They’re about to take…
Teenage bodies are bared but fresh insight concealed in writer/director Eva Husson’s first feature, a dopey examination of Instagram-abetted adolescent abandon. Inspired by a news item that Husson came across in 1999 about a group of orgy-loving high schoolers in the U.S., Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story), despite the…
When we heard Hollywood announced a crossover film between 21 Jump Street and Men in Black, the aptly titled MIB/23, we were a little befuddled. How did they come up with such a foolproof concept? It practically writes itself. So why stop there? This is the perfect opportunity to kickstart…
Each week, we’re recapping the second season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt episode by episode. Lots of sitcoms run on sex. Not sexual appeal, necessarily, but sexual plot material: pickup attempts, quirky dates, regrettable hookups, and long-running will-they-won’t-they scenarios between regular characters. This stuff’s the lifeblood shows from Friends and Seinfeld to How I Met…
Director Jake Paltrow (Young Ones, The Good Night) met Brian De Palma at a party. He’d had a few drinks and worked up the courage to talk to the legendary filmmaker, who turned out to be surprisingly open and kind. The next day, Paltrow got an email from the friend…
Ineptitude is almost an endearing quality in television characters, so long as there’s a hint of charm within. And while hapless goons frequent many tried tropes and formulaic sitcoms, very few of them remain as lovable as the shitty lawyer. Bad lawyers have been a staple of television going as…
If you can get past the spectacle of British and Australian actors portraying some of the most important figures of 20th-century American literature, Genius is a good example of a prestige pic that is not only literate but surprisingly vibrant. It’s the story of the tumultuous relationship between hot-tempered, Asheville-born…
In Anna Rose Holmer’s The Fits, emotion becomes motion and psychology becomes space. It’s a coming-of-age story, but Holmer mostly eschews dialogue and standard storytelling devices; she tells her tale through movements and patterns and the way that she films them. The Fits follows Toni (Royalty Hightower), an 11-year-old tomboy…
Octave Mirbeau’s The Diary of a Chambermaid, a 1900 novel about the depravities in all social strata written from the point of view of a servant named Célestine, has famously been adapted twice before, by two of cinema’s immortals. Benoît Jacquot’s uneven take on the material won’t challenge the stature…
In cinema, all things move towards acceptance. In time, debates about filmmakers usually settle in favor of the filmmaker — not because detractors change their minds, but because the urgency of the conflict wanes, and stalemates go to the fans. It’s hard to believe that battle lines were once drawn…
When commercials for Mel Brooks’ Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995) ran on Channel One at my high school, I was ready. Vampire movies had dominated the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, and at last a slapstick comedy was set to lampoon all that arty melodrama. High school me couldn’t…
After spending 13 episodes catching up on life with them, we’ll miss our old familiar friends DJ, Kimmy, Stephanie and the rest of the Fuller House gang. This finale hardly felt like one, probably because we knew that there will be a second season of the show before we even…
When Joe Fortunato was 7 years old, he refused to get into the bathtub. Or go swimming in his cousin’s pool. Or join the family’s annual summer beach trip. “My mom took me to see Jaws,” Fortunato says, before adding with a laugh, “We can question my mother’s parenting skills.”…
In 2001 a friend, a grown-up, saw The Fellowship of the Ring more than a dozen time in the theater. Sometimes she’d leave with a half hour left. “I just needed to get to Galadriel and Lothlorien,” she told me. She didn’t need all the climactic fighting. In 2012 I…
Back in 2013, James Wan’s The Conjuring represented the high point of a wave of mainstream horror that showed there was still value in old-school scares — that there was life beyond torture porn and slick slasher reboots. It was a ghost story-turned-possession thriller that mined terror out of the…
There’s something satisfying about hearing Tyler Perry, as mad scientist Baxter Stockman, say the words “Eliminate those turtles,” but it’s not quite novel enough to bring Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows up to street level and out of the sewers. Early on, giant squid-like brain Krang (Brad…
Each week, we’re recapping the second season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt episode by episode. After a few rocky ones, we finally get an episode of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt that works on every level. The character development, the humor, the pacing, the relevance to the larger themes of the show — each…
