Each week, we’re recapping the second season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt episode by episode. Read it before it’s cool. Last week, we talked about how the juggling of multiple plotlines can cause inconsistency within an episode. Meanwhile, “Kimmy Drives A Car!” demonstrates how a variable production crew can cause inconsistency…
Predicting the future is a murky, and often pessimistic, business, but the movies have been doing it with varying degrees of success almost since their inception. FilmBar is holding a summer-long series in conjunction with Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination that looks back at cinematic interpretations…
In 2013, a 22-year-old Palestinian named Mohammed Assaf won the second edition of the Middle Eastern singing competition Arab Idol, a spinoff of the same popular British Pop Idol franchise that also gave us American Idol. Mohammed had snuck out of Gaza and crashed the auditions in Egypt before making…
There’s reason for skepticism when you hear that a new documentary plays like a thriller. That suggests that the filmmakers have favored suspense over documenting — that the specifics of real life will be arranged according to the logic of plotting rather than reportage. Will Allen’s sunny gut-punch cult exposé, Holy…
On June 24, Disney Channel will première the release of its 100th original movie, a remake of the 1987 film Adventures in Babysitting. It joins the ranks of some seriously iconic films that feature family fun and life lessons. To celebrate, Disney’s dedicating this Memorial Day Weekend to broadcasting an impressive…
Postpartum OCD is a real-life condition worthy of horror films. New moms fight off intrusive thoughts about someone killing or stealing their baby — or killing their baby themselves — and it’s surprisingly common. Since some of the best genre films play off of our ingrained paranoia, writer-director David Farr…
There was a time when the summer movie season was a season, sandwiched between Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends. By the 21st century, the start date drifted back to the first weekend in May. This year, the superhero flicks started arriving with Deadpool’s release on February 12. Only two…
Something troubling is afoot in Westeros: The heroes are beginning to outnumber the villains. The sixth season of Game of Thrones has already seen Jon Snow’s return from the dead, Arya Stark’s vision restored and — courtesy of two Stark children’s long-awaited reunion — the show’s first-ever tears of joy…
The guiding principle of Lewis Carroll’s classics Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass is that logic does not exist. You tumble down rabbit holes and into mirrors willy-nilly, and you try to survive, feeling what you feel, having fun when you can — oh, and try not to drown…
This should go without saying, but these days it doesn’t: Ido Haar’s globe-straddling crowd-pleaser of a doc Presenting Princess Shaw showcases real footage of the key moments of the story that it’s telling. That’s a joy and a thrill. When its subject’s life changes, and she discovers that the art…
Every week, we will be recapping the first season of Fuller House, episode by episode. In Episode 11 of Fuller House, our main ladies take small steps toward bigger leaps that will likely reshape their lives in these last few episodes, and certainly for season two. It’s great to…
If long distance is the wrong distance, what would you call an online relationship, one where the couple has never met? Guess we’ll find out with Oxygen Media’s new series Virtually in Love, a look at a collection of couples traveling the world to finally meet after a month to…
Each week, we’re recapping the second season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt episode by episode. Sitcoms like Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, where every episode has an A plot, a B plot, and sometimes a C plot, sometimes can’t help but come out uneven. That’s the case for “Kimmy Gives Up!” more than…
Let’s break the bad news this way. Maria Bamford’s new Netflix series isn’t a disaster. It’s sometimes funny — it’s got comic genius Maria Bamford in almost every scene! — but only its finest moments bear the stamp of sensibility. Too often, this fitful, clamorous show feels Bamford-flavored rather than…
The slow-moving parade of clamor and stupidity that stops up Times Square might annoy New Yorkers. But late in Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and Andy Schocken’s cross-cultural jam-session music doc Song of Lahore, the giddy garishness of those blocks comes to exemplify the very idea of free expression. As the Naked Cowboy butchers…
In TV and movies, sex is often portrayed as this romantic and perfect thing. Rarely shown are any of the problems that can arise during sex, and it’s even rarer that there’s an onscreen sense of humor about such things. But once in a while, films and television shows portray…
In Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising, the sequel to 2014’s old-people-vs.-frat-brothers comedy, Zac Efron takes off his shirt in nearly every scene he’s in. It’s a sight to behold — again and again and again, but a calculated effort, like most of this film, to appeal to the ladies. As surprising…
The first time I saw the documentary Weiner, at Missouri’s True/False Festival this past March, Donald Trump was boasting about the size of his cock during a presidential debate. Given the recent direction of our electoral politics, you might think that a film about former New York Representative Anthony Weiner…
Orenthal James Simpson always seemed a singular figure. Hardly anybody got where he got or did what he did. Certainly nobody got away with it. But of course it isn’t just the man who fascinates: It’s the image. This he shares in common with every super-grandee and megastar, every tabloid…
If it had come out 20 years ago, when its creator was Hollywood’s best-paid screenwriter, Shane Black’s The Nice Guys might have stood, for some, as more proof that the studios had lost their way. So much money lavished on bloody buddy formula, on two-fisted archetypes cracking a case, some…
In his tight, trim, health insurance thriller A Monster With a Thousand Heads, Mexican-Uruguayan director Rodrigo Plá achieves a visual style that is ice cold but also deeply human — a clever way to depict an all-powerful system that feeds on our lives and thrives on our fallibility. Plá opens…
Richard Bridgland was given an impossible task: recreate 1970s Hollywood for Shane Black’s buddy conspiracy thriller The Nice Guys … in Atlanta. As a production designer, Bridgland’s had to make the Czech Republic look like 1930s rural North Carolina (Serena), New Orleans look like West Virginia (American Ultra) and a…
