Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt Episode 6: It’s Lillian vs. the Hipsters

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…

The Idol Mostly Scores With the Story of a Palestinian Singing Star

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…

Holy Hell Offers an Intimate Study of Sun-Kissed Cult Life

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…

7 Essential Disney Channel Original Movies from the 1990s

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…

Alice Goes Through the Looking Glass Into a World of Formula

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…

Fuller House Episode 11: DJ Tanner Deserves Better

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…

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt Episode 5: The Breaking of Kimmy

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…

Song of Lahore Mashes East and West Into One Great Jazz Whole

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…

The 10 Funniest Movie and TV Sex Scenes Since 2001 (NSFW)

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…

A Sorority Spirit Seizes the Neighbors-verse

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…

Weiner Makes Comic Tragedy of a Candidate’s Fall

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…

A Woman and a Gun vs. the Medical Establishment

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…