There was never any doubt about the thoughtfulness with which Aziz Ansari, in the first season of his Netflix series, Master of None, addressed the kinds of societal divides — racial, cultural, generational, sexual — that most sitcoms either lack the vision to perceive at all or take on only…
Newly restored, James Ivory’s elegant and passionate 1987 film, Maurice, adapted from the posthumously published novel by E.M. Forster, is being rereleased. Last year, I had the chance to discuss this film and some of Ivory’s other works with the director. Here is some of our conversation. I remember the…
Heavyweight almost-champ Chuck Wepner was a character long before he inspired Sylvester Stallone to pen Rocky. But Wepner is no Rocky Balboa. Sure, he comes from a working-class town (Bayonne, New Jersey), and when he boxed, he took a good punch, bled like a hemophiliac and dreamed of taking home…
A comedy, and also a tragedy, of remarriage — without couples counseling or divorce — writer-director Azazel Jacobs’ The Lovers revitalizes its genre with a piquant premise: What happens when long-wedded spouses, each with a romantic partner outside their dormant dyad, find the spark reignited — a combustion that results…
After The Fate of the Furious premiered, talk of that franchise’s ever slicker, more over-the-top future turned to the promise (and hope) of F&F jumping the shark right into space. But what if … it was already there? And it was named, instead, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2? In…
Steve Coogan is at a fancy dinner, but he’s not doing any Michael Caine impressions. Instead, he’s brooding with resentment of his workaholic congressman brother, Stan (Richard Gere), and grappling with the realization that his son might be a psychopath. It’s all supposed to be harrowing, and the British comedian…
A sleepy earnestness both ennobles and afflicts Ricardo de Montreuil’s fathers-and-sons story, Lowriders. At first the film plays as a low-key corrective, a Hollywood drama with name producers (Brian Grazer, Jason Blum) that, outside a couple of tutorial info-dumps covering cultural basics, presents East Los Angeles lives like pretty much…
King Arthur is neither Guy Ritchie’s worst film nor his best, but it might well be his most frustrating. A compendium of all the things that make the British director so occasionally exciting and so often irritating, this new, hyper-stylized take on the Arthurian legends veers between genius and idiocy…
“I am garbage,” Amy Schumer’s Emily Middleton, on a vacation in Ecuador with her ma, Linda (Goldie Hawn), that’s gone all wrong, chimes in agreement with someone who’s leveled the insult at her — and who’s also holding the two women for ransom — in Snatched. Your enjoyment of this…
A committed (and controversial) performance from Elle Fanning as a high school kid born Ramona — but identifying as Ray — is diced up and short-shrifted in this muddled comedy-drama. The title suggests the chief trouble: Director and co-writer Gaby Dellal’s attention is divided among three generations, with Ray’s mother…
It’s a one-night-only storytelling performance.
America is going to hate this movie. Doug Liman’s The Wall — whose title will forever demand that, when bringing up the film in conversation, you’ll have to say, “No, the other Wall” — is a mean little thriller set in our desert wars, and its only American soldiers are…
Dear White People streams on Netflix For the past half-century, college campuses have served as a primary theater of the culture wars. So it’s fitting that one of the year’s most provocative, timely, searching, intellectually prickly, and ultimately satisfying series takes place at a university. Netflix’s Dear White People, which…
Serial Mom is available in a new Blu-ray edition from Shout Factory. John Waters’ response to boxes — the kind in which we tend to place others and ourselves — is to vomit on them. And then sell them, his pencil-thin mustache twisting in a good-humored smirk. Throughout his career…
Both the poet’s body and soul are made ineradicable in Davies’ lovely film.
Twice I’ve described Kitty Green’s curious, alienating docu-whatzit Casting JonBenet to friends, and twice I’ve been asked, with surprising heat, “Why?” and “What’s the point?” So, this time, before we get into the specifics of what this documentary actually documents, let’s take a moment to consider what the film isn’t…
In Montana, where writer-director Sarah Adina Smith filmed her small-town sci-fi flick, Buster’s Mal Heart, the winter-inversion clouds hang heavy in valleys, trapping the sunlight that bounces off the snow. The effect is a perpetual, sullen twilight. Smith embraces that between-light-and-dark aspect of Big Sky Country to tell the story…
It’s easy to giggle at The Circle, the movie, just as it’s easy giggle sometimes at Dave Eggers, whose novel is the film’s source. James Ponsoldt’s adaptation (co-written with Eggers) is, like Eggers’ books, nakedly earnest, engaged with nothing less but The State of Things Now, more smart than its…
Not long before the surprisingly violent finale of Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild (1986), Melanie Griffith’s wild girl-turned-good-girl-turned-complicated-girl Audrey asks Charlie (Jeff Daniels), a straight-arrow-Wall-Streeter-turned-desperate-romantic-turned-man-of-action, “What are you gonna do now that you know how the other half lives?” “The other half?” he asks, confused. “The other half of you.” The…
It’s May, and we’re all still standing. Thank you, television! I was gonna add that May is looking up, but then I noticed there’s a three-hour long Carpool Karaoke special, so instead I’ll just say that May has some growing up to do, and leave it at that. Let us…
The Leftovers airs Sundays on HBO If you don’t have religion, you should at least have The Leftovers. HBO’s rapturous drama hasn’t found much of an audience during its brief time on Earth, but those who listen to its sermon long enough tend to convert — nothing else on television…
It’s April 1992, and ABC commentator Judith Miller’s voice has an exasperated tinge as she reports to her audience that not one of the officers who beat Rodney King on that infamous videotape has been found guilty of any charges. Soon, riots break out in Los Angeles. Thousands of stores…
