Arts & Culture

We’re recapping Difficult People, episode by episode. Welcome to Shondaland!  Inspiration comes in many forms. For some, it’s derived from the success story of Shonda Rhimes. For others, it’s the stories she wrote about in her Year of Yes memoir. And for Billy, it’s in the Amazon review of the…

Ira Sachs has become one of our great American filmmakers. His newest, Little Men, about two teenage boys (Theo Taplitz and Michael Barbieri) who become best friends even as their parents face off over the fate of a small dress shop in the ground floor of a Brooklyn home, is…

The sarcastic wag who first drawled the phrase “as exciting as watching grass grow” never intended it as a compliment. But have you ever actually watched grass grow? I mean, I haven’t either, but there must be a pretty cool hidden world of fresh-smelling earth and tickly dew and bugs…

Don’t let the uptick in big-cast movies fool you: Ensemble films are difficult to make. When a script gets a projected budget in creative development, “ensemble” adds dollar signs and story challenges. Each actor needs to get a moment in the star circle, and each is competing for top billing…

The Hollars tells the familiar tale of a dysfunctional family pulled together by unfortunate circumstances. John Hollar (John Krasinski, who also directed) is a frustrated graphic novelist with a pregnant girlfriend, Rebecca (Anna Kendrick). When he gets the news that his mother, Sally (Margo Martindale), has a brain tumor, he…

Critics often dismiss blockbuster entertainments with the vague, half-assed complaint that they resemble “video games.” Movies like Fede Alvarez’s Don’t Breathe reveal games’ actual influence — for the better. The breakthrough with studio horror films in recent years, since the found-footage boom, is a welcome environmental immersiveness. It’s a testament…

Just like there’s a bizarro internet where Donald Trump is celebrated as a warm, loving, generous, successful businessman who really wants to earn a Purple Heart, I wonder if there’s also a bizarro, ravenous audience awaiting a feature-film re-enactment of Donald and Melania’s epic first date. (He literally tricked his…

The attempt to reconcile the personal with the political has been the great theme of Nanni Moretti’s cinema, as it was for many of the legendary Italian directors before him. In Mia Madre, it finds one of its more vivid examinations. The film’s concept is blunt — a director struggles…

We should be tired of wondering why Scandinavians are so fascinated with runaway crime — it’s obviously because they have so little of it. Set in Chicago or Bangkok or Juarez, vicious bloodletting might play like wallpaper, but it comes off as almost surreal, and a little gimmicky, when framed…

Robert De Niro — the Raging Bull himself, now aged from boxer to trainer — is introduced in Hands of Stone bathed in Madison Square Garden’s overhead spotlights, more the image of a reigning champ than the promising fighter whose American debut his character Ray Arcel has come to see…

It’s hard out there for a TV comedy fan. That’s the case for network television, at least. Before All in the Family altered the TV comedy landscape, most sitcoms hewed closely to the formula of solving minor annoyances in 22 minutes (with the occasional “OMG Vincent Price in Hawaii” curveball)…