Arts & Culture

Here’s a story you might have missed a few weeks back, what with the country collapsing. In late June, at Dallas’ Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center, 30 aspirational souls received burn treatment after walking over hot coals at a Tony Robbins seminar. Robbins, a seize-your-life salesman of granite physique and…

Kindly allow this lengthy aside and conspiracy theorizing: I can’t start my review of Paul Feig’s redo of Ghostbusters without first mentioning the stupefying chaos that attended last Thursday evening’s press screening, the only one of two scheduled a half-hour apart in New York before the movie’s opening. This unprecedented…

Is it possible to sustain a feature in a single interior location with the premise that three outlaws on the run may or may not rape the three women of the house, two of whom are already being molested by their father? I mean, you could. But why the hell…

Bob Mazur, in his bestselling memoir, sounds like any of us when we shift careers, writing that he wanted something that “kept my interest, that didn’t box me into the same boring routine.” The only difference is that Mazur didn’t break the box quitting an ad job to launch a…

The futuristic dystopia of the arty sci-fi romance Equals will be familiar to anyone who’s seen the likes of Gattaca, The Island or THX 1138. It’s a cool, rational, lifeless world, blanketed in whites and grays and blues, and peopled with unfeeling faces — a world whose citizens will express…

Café Society is surprisingly ambitious by the standards of late-period Woody Allen — a veritable epic taking in a broad swath of a young man’s life and charting his progress from wide-eyed innocent to cold, confident operator. But that’s also why the film, in some senses, could only have been…

It’s no secret that some documentary films are either partly or largely staged. Think of Errol Morris’s re-enactments; think of the fake archival footage in Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell; think of documentary granddad Robert Flaherty casting and concocting scenarios for Nanook of the North. That these strategies can also…

Few of us live our lives in widescreen. Instead, the frames in which our days play out tend to be tight and personal, the vistas only occasional. We see what we need to, what’s before us, what we actually inhabit. That truth has long been the source of a distracting…

Viewers complaining that a protagonist isn’t “likable” usually mean something more like “the protagonist doesn’t stir my empathy” — after all, audiences adore cozying up to scripted TV’s fascinating creeps. Winning that empathy demands that writers, directors and actors lay bare their characters’ selves, immersing us in their perspectives, engaging…

Here’s some good news: Netflix is now streaming Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. No other TV show is quite so ambitious or politically deft as star and executive producer Rachel Bloom’s (and co-creator Aline Brosh McKenna’s) darkly comic, whip-smart send-up of romantic comedies. The title alone has turned more than one of my…

Each week, we’re recapping the second season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt episode by episode. Typically, we talk about these episodes in terms of A, B, and C plots based on their prominence in the episode. But that structure surprisingly doesn’t apply to “Kimmy Sees A Sunset!” Each story here has…