When I first saw Brett Morgen’s 2002 documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture, I was shocked that the film somehow matched the rollicking, mercurial energy of its subject, producer Robert Evans. Morgen reimagined the use of archival footage and voiceover, and the style he pioneered has now been mimicked…
Like most of the better Marvel efforts, Thor: Ragnarok feels like the work of a unique sensibility instead of a huddle of brand managers. While the studio’s films demonstrated plenty of comic flair right from the start of its shared-universe experiment, with 2008’s Iron Man, recent efforts have veered too…
This piece has spoilers for the first six episodes of the second season of Stranger Things. Look, I like the show, but the title is a lie. Seemingly inspired by that one line from Hamlet that I kept hearing in presentations the time I reported on a UFO convention, the…
Sean Baker’s The Florida Project, the follow-up to the breakout indie comic drama Tangerine, sparkles with joy and hope even as it tells a not-so-hopeful story. In the film, little Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) and her mother Halley (Bria Vinaite) reside in Kissimmee, Fla., in a rundown motel that’s as colorful as…
The last few months have seen some welcome innovation in the cry-along subgenre of dramas about finding the will to keep living after bodily catastrophe. First, in the notably sincere and unsensational Stronger, director David Gordon Green and his crew strove to strip away as much of such films’ usual…
Imagine a remake of Cape Fear shot like Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, with Max Cady recast as a child, and you’ll have some idea of the strangeness of Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Killing of a Sacred Deer. It was one of the most divisive titles at this year’s Cannes festival, thanks…
Something of a prank, a farewell, an art project, a buddy comedy, a vox populi tour of the French countryside, and an inquiry into memory and images and what it means to reveal our eyes to the world, Faces Places is a joyous lulu. It finds the great documentarian and…
The labyrinthine nature of memory, trauma and guilt is made concrete in Benedict Andrews’ Una, a film that intermittently sends its characters wandering around what looks like an actual maze. In the title role, Rooney Mara puts her perpetually haunted gaze to good use as a melancholy woman whiling her…
Filmmaking is not a poor man’s game. Even as digital cameras get cheaper, making a film worthy of release still requires dough to get off the ground, which means the folks who tell stories through cinema tend to come from backgrounds of privilege. That breeds movies aimed at middle- to…
For all his reputation as a capital-A Auteur, Todd Haynes has always demonstrated impressive stylistic versatility. The Sirkian pastiche of Far from Heaven is a far cry from the lo-fi expressionism of Poison, and the music video wonderland of Velvet Goldmine has relatively little in common with the fractured minimalism…
Maybe it’s encouraging, in a way, that an America in crisis struggles so mightily to make crowd-pleasing war movies. Whatever their politics, no studio exec today would let a wide-release desert-war drama come right out and say what even the GOP increasingly admits: that Iraq was a mistake, that Afghanistan has…
We Slaughter Barbecue isn’t easy to find. On the outskirts of Bastrop about 30 miles east of Austin, it sits off the side of state Highway 304 in what was once known as the Last Chance Gas Station. It was the only full-service gas station for miles around, and it had the…
Maggie Betts’ Novitiate bears all the signs of an exceptional talent. It follows the experiences of Cathleen (Margaret Qualley), a teenager who enters a convent in the early 1960s just as the Catholic Church was starting to undergo the reforms of Vatican II. The title refers to the girls’ yearlong…
South Park airs on Comedy Central Last year, just days after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone told a reporter that the next season of their show wouldn’t take aim at Trump, because “satire has become reality.” After 20 years of…
Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold premieres Oct. 27 on Netflix Joan Didion has set an impossible standard for any documentarian who would want to cover her life. She’s essentially already done it herself, brilliantly, in her essays, novels and films. Still, Didion’s nephew, actor/director Griffin Dunne, takes a…
Fifty years ago, in 1967, Cool Hand Luke, The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, In the Heat of the Night and The Dirty Dozen rocked American cinemas. And somewhere in a field outside Pittsburgh, George Romero and John Russo were shooting on black-and-white 16mm film a low-budget movie that would found…
In the opening shot of Only the Brave, a flaming bear — not just a bear that happens to be burning but one that looks as if it had been created entirely from fire — lunges at the camera in the middle of a blazing forest. The image returns a…
The day you first hear Chavela Vargas is the best day you’ll have that year. A majestic and inimitable performer, and a lesbian trailblazer of gender nonconformity, the Mexican chanteuse stripped ranchera music to its wounded heart, singing lovesick, masculine cowboy songs with a voice that holds hurting like liquor…
You’re right not to trust a film critic who calls a move stunning. But let me say this about Human Flow, the epic new documentary surveying the scope of the global refugee crisis, from Chinese artist/activist Ai Weiwei: It stunned me, in the truest sense of the word. Again and…
The Opposition airs weeknights on Comedy Central In the first episode of Comedy Central’s new nightly satirical late-night series The Opposition with Jordan Klepper, the host explains why he jumped ship from The Daily Show, where he’d been a correspondent since 2015. The Jordan Klepper who cocked his eyebrow through…
One of Us premieres Oct. 20 on Netflix New Yorkers will immediately recognize the opening shots of One of Us, the new documentary from Jesus Camp filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady: ultra-Orthodox Jewish families roaming the big city, the women and girls in skirts and tights, the men and…
Writer/director Angela Robinson’s Professor Marston and the Wonder Women is achingly normal, in a good way. Robinson has proven herself capable of melding her sincere and often endearingly campy sensibilities to any cinematic style — spy spoofs (D.E.B.S.), Disney family flicks (Herbie: Fully Loaded), comic-dramas (The L Word), sexy vampire…
