Officially, the brutish thriller Atomic Blonde takes place in Berlin just before and after the toppling of the Wall, in early November 1989. But this seismic event is really just a backdrop for another epochal marker: the decade that saw the birth of MTV and the height of New German…
The Incredible Jessica James premieres July 28 on Netflix. Sometimes critics and filmmakers agree. We suggested, in our 2015 review of People Places Things, that writer-director James Strouse should please give more screen time to supporting actor Jessica Williams. Now, in his new rom-com for Netflix, The Incredible Jessica James,…
The Last Tycoon premieres July 28 on Amazon Prime. Here’s how a fan magazine might profile the hero of The Last Tycoon (Amazon), played by Matt Bomer. His name belongs in marquees, but he deserves a place somewhere higher. Monroe Stahr toils as an angel on Earth, making dreams come…
What might be most horrific about the horrors exposed in Matthew Heineman’s overwhelming City of Ghosts is their familiarity. The film documents the efforts of citizen journalists to alert the world to ISIS’s ravaging of Raqqa, their Syrian hometown, which Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi and his extremist followers seized four years…
Jenny Slate’s laughter comes out in a wild gush, as though she’s been shaken and uncorked, the sound somehow puppyishly sweet and punkishly impolite. Her characters, cheery cynics, often fail to quite match the mood of a room, so their amused eruptions can hurt feelings, stir bafflement, inspire the ol’…
Insecure returns July 23 on HBO No moment captures the elations of HBO’s Insecure better than the opening scene of the sophomore season’s second episode. The morning after sleeping with her ex-boyfriend, Issa (Issa Rae) recounts her confusion about the abrupt quickie to her snappish best friend, Molly (Yvonne Orji)…
“Every love story is a ghost story,” David Foster Wallace wrote, more than once. That evocative observation is probed in David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, a film that occasionally reaches a similar level of eloquence. Lowery’s fourth feature reunites Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck, the leads of his second, the…
A “feminist” film need not portray all its female characters in a positive light. Women aren’t a monolith of benevolence. Still, a film with multiple female characters who are equal parts sympathetic and sadistic, who face off against one another in a battle of wits and will, exposing some harsh…
Kuso premieres on Shudder July 21. It’s nearly impossible to categorize the first feature-length film by Steven Ellison (a.k.a. Flying Lotus, the experimental beatmaster, music producer and rapper). Made up of multiple, wildly varied vignettes that intersect and revolve around the theme of a chaotic post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, where every…
It must be nice being Luc Besson, stuck at the age of 14 for the past 44 years. Back when I was that age, in the late 1980s, Besson was among my favorite working filmmakers. I adored the earnest wonder of the deep-sea worlds of The Big Blue (1988) and…
Truth in advertising: Girls trip hard during their New Orleans getaway in Girls Trip, which maybe doesn’t need that possessive apostrophe after all. Malcolm D. Lee’s comedy, written by Kenya Barris and Tracy Oliver — the same creative team behind last year’s uneven Barbershop: The Next Cut — pops with…
Ozark premieres on Netflix on Friday, July 21. When Skyler White challenged her husband’s secret fun life of crime on Breaking Bad, the backlash to her drove Anna Gunn to write an op-ed in The New York Times. Gunn revealed that a number of disturbing “hate boards” had often conflated…
The nerve-racking war thriller Dunkirk is the movie Christopher Nolan’s entire career has been building up to, in ways that even he may not have realized. He’s taken the British Expeditionary Force’s 1940 evacuation from France, early in World War II — a moment of heroism-in-defeat that has become an…
You can’t expect a storyteller to wring much suspense out of a real-life plot to assassinate Hitler. In the case of Georg Elser, the subject of Oliver Hirschbiegel’s German drama 13 Minutes, the filmmakers must contend not just with the fact that we know Elser’s 1939 bomb won’t end the…
Jeff Orlowski grew up wanting to be a nature photographer. But like so many in that field, his work now focuses less on capturing Earth’s natural wonders than it does on cataloguing their steady demise. “This is an entire field of professionals who are witnessing firsthand the falling apart of…
To the Bone premiered July 14 on Netflix About 10 minutes into Marti Noxon’s eating-disorder drama, To the Bone, Ellen (Lily Collins) sneaks away from her overbearing stepmom, Susan (Carrie Preston), to chug warm water from a public-bathroom faucet (a trick to fool the body into thinking it’s full so…
Chasing Coral premiered July 14 on Netflix. In February 1995, Charlton Heston called Rush Limbaugh’s radio program to read from Jurassic Park – the book, not the movie. In his best Old Testament boom, Heston declaimed a speech about man’s hubris that Michael Crichton had written for Dr. Ian Malcolm,…
From Game of Thrones to The Handmaid’s Tale, narratives of sexual assault have become particularly common in film and TV lately. But rarely do we think about the filmmakers, actors and crew who make on-screen rapes happen. How do they feel? Are they tired of rape scenes? Or could portraying rape could actually be a positive thing?
The new tech comedy Loaded (AMC) opens seconds before the finalization of the sale of a game app called Cat Factory for £300 million. Confirmation from his bank that his account balance has gone from several hundred quid in the red to David Cameron’s tax bracket propels lead designer Josh…
Somehow, while we were worrying about superheroes and star destroyers and hot rods and whether Captain America could beat up Superman or whatever, the goddamned Planet of the Apes movies became the most vital and resonant big-budget film series in the contemporary movie firmament. And they did it with the…
Maudie is hit-or-miss, but you’ll probably bawl anyway. Its creators have elected to dramatize nothing but the things that traditional narrative features usually botch. The film, directed by Aisling Walsh, surveys the life of a beloved artist, Nova Scotia’s self-taught folk painter Maud Lewis, who produced scores of cheerily primitive…
The pitch for The Big Sick might sound like a tacky weepie you’d have been afraid to watch on TV in the 1990s. But it’s hard to do justice to the balancing act that the creators of this singular comedy have achieved. Based on events in the life of star…
