Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s Graduation is one of the best films I’ve ever seen about corruption. That’s true despite the fact that Mungiu underplays the typical elements found in tales about this subject: You won’t find many fast-talking crooks, sinister cops or elaborate sting operations here. Or a looming sense…
Keep your eyes on the magician’s hands. She’ll attempt to distract you with compliments and silly quips, but her most effective feint will be the story she tells as she shuffles the cards. She might give quaint mention to a lover’s spat between the King of Hearts and the Queen…
In Eric D. Howell’s adaptation of Silvio Raffo’s ghostly 1996 novel, Voice From the Stone, a timid woman finds employment as a nanny with a rural family ravaged by grief. The longer she stays in their cavernous, stone-and-stucco villa, the more she comes to act, talk, and look like the…
The Handmaid’s Tale premieres April 26 on Hulu In the first episode of The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood herself shows up to slap our heroine in the face. The grande dame of dystopian fiction plays an aunt, one of the abbesses in charge of a new order of so-called handmaids:…
If civilization were to end tomorrow — and who the hell knows, it just might — we could learn a lot about building the next one from the films of Hirokazu Kore-eda. Back in 1998, the Japanese director had his U.S. breakthrough with the wildly acclaimed After Life. Since then,…
“I’ve been trained for this.” Those words — or some variation — come up several times throughout James Gray’s The Lost City of Z, and they serve as one key to this strange, sprawling, majestic film. In adapting the 2009 nonfiction book about the search for a fabled city in…
“Rob has this ridiculous beard and it’s such great, self-effacing, wonderful work he’s doing,” James Gray says about his film recounting the life of a British explorer who disappeared while pursuing his lifelong obsession with a mythical city in the Amazon.
First things first. The new Mystery Science Theater 3000, that basic-cable and UHF puppet show that was above all else a treatise about what it was like to grow up on basic cable and UHF, is a cheery, companionable continuation, an almost business-as-usual new season Kickstarted and Netflixed that Febreezes…
“Ludwig, you are the favorite of the Lord because more than any other man, you are exposed to sin.” A compassionate priest says this to the mad king of Bavaria about halfway through Ludwig, Luchino Visconti’s sprawling 1972 film, now finally available, in all its uncut glory, in a gorgeous…
HBO’s acid-bathed Beltway satire Veep didn’t exactly predict our absurd political reality. But it did come close enough that revisiting past seasons is like watching footage of a train wreck run backwards in slow motion. The episode called “C**tgate” brought a vaginal euphemism into a presidential election. “Election Night” saw…
Terry George’s The Promise has the rare good fortune of turning up in theaters just weeks after another film showed how necessary a movie like this is. The second star-driven war-adventure film of 2017 to set a cross-cultural love triangle against the horror of the Armenian Genocide, The Promise would…
Nasty, brutish and not short enough, Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire has a simple — and ultimately simpleminded — premise: to protract what would normally be a brief shoot-out scene to the majority of the movie’s 90-minute running time. On the surface, this reductio ad absurdum has a kind of pleasing…
“It’s a balance of fun, imagination, and irreverence.”
Over four features and countless shorts, Spanish director Nacho Vigalondo has cemented his status as a director who mixes genre elements with surprisingly personal stories and playful narrative trickery. His mind-bending first feature Timecrimes (2007) starts off as a horror movie, then turns into a time-travel tale and finally the…
The comforting analog clack of typewriter keys is a leitmotif in Their Finest, Lone Scherfig’s slight but appealing adaptation of Lissa Evans’ novel Their Finest Hour and a Half (who knows why the subject of the original title was confusingly cast aside). In this tale of British filmmaking during World…
Two seemingly incongruous categories — the small-scale romantic doodle and the rampaging-creature feature — are brought together in Nacho Vigalondo’s Colossal, a film that never really fulfills the potential of its adventurous premise. This monster mash-up argues the opposite of what Humphrey Bogart declared in Casablanca: The problems of two…
In Netflix’s new teen-suicide drama series 13 Reasons Why, pretty-boy Marcus (Steven Silver) tells good-guy Clay (Dylan Minnette) that whatever the kids did to Hannah Baker (Katherine Langford) to make her kill herself was no different than what happens to any other girl in any other high school everywhere. And…
It’s a good thing Jonathan Banks has such an interesting face. At the beginning of the third season of Better Call Saul, we spend a lot of quiet time with Banks’ surly, crooked-nosed cop-turned-criminal Mike Ehrmantraut of Breaking Bad fame, watching as he dismantles his own car and works out…
Holy motors! How will they top this one? This is perhaps the fastest and, if not, certainly the most furious of the Fast & Furious movies. The beauty of the Fast & Furious movies is that no car stunt is ever too nonsensical.
Catch up on prior seasons of Vanderpump Rules on Hulu. Part one of the season five reunion airs Monday, April 3 on Bravo. Detractors of reality TV pooh-pooh the genre as a vacuous cesspool that celebrates crass idiocy and normalizes bad behavior that leads to societal horrors like our current…
This April, let us celebrate the glory of the flowers blossoming in vaginal fashion by only highlighting shows created by women. The list will be shorter than usual because Hollywood hates women, and we aren’t allowed to create magical stuff, and the world is worse off because of it. Anyway,…
Life is in the details, and the remarkable yet frustrating eight-part miniseries Feud: Bette and Joan, of which five episodes have aired so far, is at its best when it captures the quiet textures of a given day: Bette Davis (Susan Sarandon), waking up at 5 a.m. on the first…
