No matter your opinion of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a person, you can’t deny this: The man is a doer. And in Elliott Lester’s grief drama Aftermath, the ripped Renaissance man does a subtle, absorbing performance of despair so unlike his other work that his lined and laden face at times…
Somebody at Warners must’ve seen Going in Style, the 1979 film about old men robbing a bank, and decided that a happier, peppier version could be profitable. The original has no less than George Burns, Jackie Gleason sidekick Art Carney, and method-acting legend Lee Strasberg as old fogies who decide…
Ghost in the Shell looks great, sounds great, and has a gaping hole at its center — where its emotional core should be. This big-budget adaptation of the Japanese manga and anime classic (Masamune Shirow’s comic premiered in the late 1980s, Mamoru Oshii’s highly influential first film version in 1995)…
The Boss Baby might look, at first, like any other major studio animation release. Directed by DreamWorks vet Tom McGrath (Madagascar, Megamind), the movie hits all the expected notes: the enduring importance of family, the persistence of untrustworthy/clueless adults, and the inherent hilarity of shoehorning David Mamet dialogue into a…
Niki Caro has the rare ability to elevate what could be emotionally manipulative schlock to earnest art. To judge by the trailer, her low-budget breakthrough feature Whale Rider (2003) seemed a straightforward children’s drama about a girl overcoming the odds — tame, commercial Disney fare. But the film itself proved…
Witherspoon is a marvel, hilarious and exasperating.
CHiPS is the latest kitschy-yet-beloved cop show to get remodeled on the big screen as a bromantic buddy comedy. However, unlike the way the movie versions of Starsky & Hutch and 21 Jump Street played up those shows’ alleged homoeroticism for ironic, lighthearted laughs, CHiPS lets it be known from…
The Blackcoat’s Daughter is available on demand. I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House streams on Netflix. When writer/director Osgood “Oz” Perkins asked his musician brother Elvis to score his first film — a demonic-possession horror pic starring Kiernan Shipka, Lucy Boynton and Emma Roberts called The…
The premise for Charlie McDowell’s The Discovery is so simple and poetic that it’s hard to believe it hasn’t been done before: A scientist discovers definitive proof of an afterlife, and the world responds with mass suicides. McDowell, who scored a sleeper hit with The One I Love — which…
Unpromisingly, Five Came Back, a series that surveys the military service of Frank Capra, John Ford, John Huston, George Stevens and William Wyler — who cut off their Hollywood careers to serve in the Second World War and were thereafter irrevocably changed both in profession and in life — opens…
The Gong Show paved the way for today’s reality competition TVscape.
In 1976’s The Devil Finds Work, James Baldwin makes a crucial verb distinction when discussing the screen legends, like Bette Davis, with whom he was transfixed (sometimes uneasily so) in his youth: “One does not go to see them act: one goes to watch them be.” When one goes to…
Almost no one ever asks young women what they desire — in movies or reality. Feminine cravings are still seen as a dire threat, a grand disturbance to the power structure, and the few movie men who dare speak the words “What do you want?” — like Noah in The…
Consider, before you consider anything else about the sequel to Trainspotting, that the director of both films is an artist whose signal trait had been a seeming repulsion at the thought of ever going back to the well. Between the original and the new T2 (cheeky title, innit), Danny Boyle…
There’s more of a narrative in Song to Song than in Terrence Malick’s last two films, but that may not, at first, seem like a good thing. Pin Malick’s work down these days — tease a story or philosophy out of it – and you’re usually faced with something simple,…
The beginning marks the beginning of the end: A middle-aged man rouses from sleep, about to face another day of accosting and insulting strangers. He hates people but needs them, too. His voice-over kicks in, a peroration that opens with a bid for camaraderie (“Remember when we were kids and…
To understand how Ritesh Batra’s The Sense of an Ending might disappoint you if you’ve read the suspenseful, tear-jerking Julian Barnes novel on which it’s based, you should think back to Batra’s much-lauded debut feature The Lunchbox (2013). In that humanistic film, a young woman trapped in her marriage falls…
Somehow, MTV2, the channel that was launched 21 years ago to show all the music videos MTV wasn’t, has essentially turned into BET — or TV One or Centric or whatever black programming-filled channel you know about. The evidence is all there — before it jumped back to its original…
Having now reached the age of its wayward protagonist, Donnie Darko is once again being tasked with forestalling the end of the world. Richard Kelly’s sleeper first opened almost two years after screening at Sundance, and a month after 9/11, becoming an early example of a trend that scarcely exists…
Some of us can never have too much of the Brontës. But I understand if your response to another dose of costume drama on the moors is “Shoot me now.” Reader, be strong! If you were dead, you’d be deprived of the chance to be proven so pleasantly wrong by…
Mainstream awareness of Breitbart, Infowars and other unsavory conservative “news” outlets has skyrocketed, as millions suddenly found themselves needing to know who Steve Bannon et al. were. For me, none of these outlets or talking points were news: I’m Texas born-and-raised — there, free-floating libertarian paranoia is a standard component…
The antagonistic atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair relished it when Life magazine called her “The Most Hated Woman in America” in the 1964 profile that only heightened her notoriety. That designation followed the 1963 Supreme Court ruling on Murray v. Curlett (and another lawsuit) that ended Bible-reading in public schools. Director…
