Ben Wheatley and Amy Jump’s microbudget black-and-white English Civil War mushroom-trip movie A Field in England (2013) squeezed a tense and bizarre story from just a few dudes wandering around in a field. The married couple and filmmaking team — Wheatley as director and Jump as writer — previously made…
At long last, Whit Stillman has adapted a Jane Austen book. To be sure, he has touched on her work numerous times — particularly in his 1990 directorial debut Metropolitan, in which an argument about Mansfield Park gave us the immortal line “I don’t read novels. I prefer good literary…
Each week, we’re recapping the second season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt episode by episode. Watch out for porns. After episode three’s lackluster fare, we were worried that the rest of season two of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt would become a drag to watch. Instead, “Kimmy Kidnaps Gretchen” is a likely frontrunner for…
Not much has been heard from Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan since it won the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, beating out pictures like Todd Haynes’ Carol, László Nemes’ Son of Saul and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin. But going into this understated film cold isn’t a bad way to…
In his archly empathetic comedies, Whit Stillman has long chronicled the uncertain ways in which young people of privilege launch themselves into worlds too in decline to offer them much. The debutante-ball life of Metropolitan or the nightclub and publishing circles of The Last Days of Disco are already dying before…
Even by the standards of Yorgos Lanthimos, The Lobster’s premise is a doozy: Colin Farrell plays a recently single schlub forced to report to the Hotel, where he has 45 days to form a romantic relationship lest he be turned into an animal of his choosing. This is the plight…
This week, thousands of Arizona State University graduates will walk across the commencement stage and out into the unknown. Many will have set the foundation for their careers while in school, some even gaining notoriety in the process. With more than 80,000 students in enrolled overall, we’re bound to have…
There’s a scene during the first half of Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Apocalypse that is so emotionally resonant, so well-put-together and so quiet that you might briefly forget you’re watching a superhero film. It involves a raid by some Polish officers in the remote forest where Erik Lehnsherr, aka Magneto (Michael…
Warning: The following contains spoilers for HBO’s Game of Thrones through season 6, episode 3. On last week’s Game of Thrones, we finally saw the moment that some fans prayed would come and others hoped would never happen: Jon Snow came back to life. Certain critics immediately deemed this a great…
In an appreciation published in The Guardian a few days after the death of J.G. Ballard, in April 2009, Martin Amis noted that the paragon of New Wave science fiction was “remorselessly visual.” Ben Wheatley’s muddled adaptation of the dystopian 1975 novel High-Rise — one of many Ballard books that…
In his mid-late novel Galapagos, Kurt Vonnegut posited that, after millions of years of evolution, all that our simple, seal-like descendants will have in common with us is the habit of cracking up at each other’s farts. Rodrigo García’s sober parable Last Days in the Desert makes a similar claim,…
Even when working from source material crafted by others, Terence Davies, like all singular filmmakers, imprints it with his DNA. At once solemn and lusty, Davies’ page-to-screen transfer of Scottish author Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s 1932 novel beautifully conveys human fragility, our bodies and minds outmatched by the brute indifference of…
Las Vegas is home to ordinary people who take the bus to work like everyone else. In The Trust, the stylish new heist film from Alex and Benjamin Brewer, we get a brief, satisfying, darkly comic peek at everyday Vegas life as lived by low-level LVPD officers. Then the film…
Every week, we’re recapping the first season of Fuller House, episode by episode. Have mercy, Becky’s back! When we started watching Fuller House, we thought this season, like most other Netflix originals, would only be 10 episodes. Come to find out, it’s a network-average 13 – which is good in…
According to her emails, Hillary Clinton has had an eye on Alicia Florrick since season one. As her pop-culture portraits go, The Good Wife has been a flattering one. Its protagonist first followed in the footsteps of many a political spouse by standing by her man, then relaunched her career,…
Watching first-time feature director Ben Chace’s Sin Alas is like a stroll through the streets of Havana. You weave through crowds in a pedicab, hang out on street corners to hear the latest gossip and meander on the majestic Malecón, the historic esplanade on the city’s coastline. But it’s not…
Each week, we’re recapping the second season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt episode by episode. Take a seat, the performance is starting. Few sitcoms can go for very long without a single bad episode, and it’s actually a little impressive that Kimmy made it this far. But “Kimmy Goes to a Play!”…
On the surface, there has been a lot of forward movement on television for black women. We’re now able to see an incredible breadth of black female characters, including Cookie Lyon (Taraji P. Henson) on Empire, Rosalee (Jurnee Smollett-Bell) on Underground and Dr. Rainbow Johnson (Tracee Ellis Ross) on Black-ish…
I happen to be a daughter with a mother, and I tear up just thinking about how difficult/wonderful it is to have a mom. So you might think Mothers and Daughters, from first-time feature director Paul Duddridge with a script by Paige Cameron, would be my movie. You would be…
Never one to betray the courage of his convictions, Luca Guadagnino excels at the unrepentantly grandiose and ludicrous. The title alone of his previous narrative feature, I Am Love (2009), signaled operatic sweep and loony sincerity, qualities further exalted by the film’s visual ravishments and seductive voluptuousness. The Italian director’s…
Yes, teenagers can be terrifying. Anyone who’s ever crossed the street to avoid whatever angst they might hurl at you out of boredom or unfounded antipathy knows this. Some can be like doughy bread, waiting until all the neurons coalesce, while others can be a ticking time bomb. In Memoria,…
None of us should give a crap about anything anyone says in Elstree 1976, but such is the nature of modern fandom that we do — even those of us whose affection for Star Wars is now more an occasional indulgence than a heated obsession. Jon Spira’s documentary is a…
