Arts & Culture

In Robin Swicord’s Wakefield, an adaptation of the late E.L. Doctorow’s short story of the same name, disillusioned lawyer Howard Wakefield (Bryan Cranston) chases a raccoon from his decrepit backhouse and … never returns. The story’s not science fiction; Howard doesn’t get swallowed by a black hole. He’s still among…

Don’t expect Amir Bar-Lev’s Long Strange Trip, a sweeping if not very penetrating look at the 30-year career of the Grateful Dead, to offer major revelations. For any Deadhead — and it’s hard to imagine any other kind of viewer settling in for the four-hour running time — the basic…

Yes, dead men tell no tales — but neither, really, do the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Rather than stories, the series, of which this 2017 entry is the fifth, offers an unpalatable mix of mincing slapstick, rote derring-do, ponderous CGI, whiskery sea-chanty mysticism, and dutiful action sequences whose only…

Solid rule of thumb: Never accept strawberries from strangers on the street, no matter how good-looking the fruit or well-spoken the unknown person. But maybe that’s just me. For Clare (Teresa Palmer), the intrepid Australian backpacker who in Berlin Syndrome finds herself imprisoned in a Berlin apartment by a romantic…

However you look at Julian Assange — radical hero, martyr, Trumpist sell-out, probable rapist, victim of his cult of personality — there’s something in Laura Poitras’ documentary Risk to confirm your point of view. You might not think there would be much left to say on this subject, particularly after…

Pour one out for the summer movie season, which was once Memorial Day till Labor Day but now has spread like a self-replicating, geometrically evolving A.I. determined to cleanse the Earth of human vermin. Around the turn of the century, the summer movies started showing up the first weekend in…

Last year’s Cannes Festival seemed to be all about the past, trauma, and the persistence of memory. It’s too early in this year’s festival to suss out any broad themes, but the one-two punch of Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck and Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless, the first two Official Competition titles to screen,…

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’s disparate obsessions form an unwieldy constellation, like a winged horse with three eyes and a blobfish for a tail. Tina Fey’s Netflix comedy mines one-liners from doomsday cults, parenthood, the gig economy, 1990s pop culture, feminine accommodation and the Upper East Side’s gold-toilet elite. The only constant…

It might be surprising to realize that David Lynch has only ever made one period piece: The Elephant Man (1980), set in the Victorian era. The rest of the director’s films, save for his 1984 sci-fi disaster Dune, take place in what presumably is the here and now. Or, more…

The tagline for David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006), which he has avowed is his final film, is a four-word fragment: “a woman in trouble.” However simple, the phrase hypnotically evokes the sinister, insoluble mysteries that have been at the core of many of his ten features and especially in Twin…

Yes, there’s spoilers below for this unspoilable show. “Don’t let yourself be hurt this time,” sings Julee Cruise on “Falling,” the plushly minimalist 1989 synth ballad that, a year later, stripped of its vocal and lyrics, would become the opening theme for Twin Peaks. David Lynch himself wrote that lyric,…