April Wolfe is reporting for us from the Toronto International Film Festival. Dictators are a certain kind of selfish, insecure insanity made manifest, and if you’re going to study them, Joseph Stalin is a good place to start. “Stalin” wasn’t even his real name. When he was 30, he changed…
When actor/writer/director Justin Chon was 11, his father took in early news reports about the Los Angeles riots of 1992 and left without a word to drive to the family’s shoe store in Paramount, a relatively poor 4.8-square-mile city bordered by Compton and Downey. “In a lot of Korean families,…
First They Killed My Father premieres on Netflix on Sept. 15 It would have been easy for Angelina Jolie’s adaptation of Cambodian genocide survivor Loung Ung’s 2000 memoir to go ruthlessly and repeatedly for the emotional jugular. First They Killed My Father is, after all, the story of a young…
Top of the Lake: China Girl airs on SundanceTV Jane Campion’s initial plan for Top of the Lake, her SundanceTV drama about sexual violence in a rural New Zealand town, was for the story of haunted detective Robin Griffin (Elisabeth Moss) to come to a full stop at the end…
In Eliza Hittman’s debut feature, It Felt Like Love, a young girl tests the waters of adult sexuality, offering her body up to the statuesque bros who live in her Eastern Seaboard beach town. She tries her hardest to mimic the women in pornos, the ones all the boys want,…
Fire Chasers premieres Sept. 8 on Netflix The greatest surprise is the beauty. The gripping new Netflix documentary series Fire Chasers opens with visions of orange-and-black hell, of ash and apocalypse, of California homes and trees and horizons ablaze, of the sky itself now some jack-o’-lantern’s smile. The fire brightens…
Clowns look scary. Even if their intention is to entertain children, their wide, painted smiles instantly become menacing with a droop of their makeup-coated brows. That’s why, in 1986, horror writer Stephen King chose a clown named Pennywise to be the child-eating villain of his classic novel IT. In 1990,…
It floats in the darkness, unspooling onscreen with a sepulchral glow. It has waited for what seems like an eternity to meet the eyes of its audience, and it senses in them both anticipation and dread. Yes, there was that bizarre miniseries back in 1990 (God, remember Tim Curry in…
Is there a more telling symptom of the sickness afflicting studio filmmaking right now than the fact that there aren’t more good Reese Witherspoon comedies out there? In eras past, a hit could be built more years than not around a star like her. Sunny yet tart, she’s a romantic…
It’s September and TV is back so praise the lord and pass the Postmates app, because I’m not trying to leave my apartment unless it’s to protest Donald Trump. It’s just TV, protest Trump and repeat. Happy fall! Sept. 5, FX, American Horror Story: Cult This season of Ryan Murphy’s…
Since it premiered at Cannes earlier this year, the Safdie brothers’ man-on-the-run, darkly comedic thriller Good Time has been hailed as something of a return to classic New York movies, i.e. from before the Giuliani cleanup, when Martin Scorsese was experimenting with cinema on the streets. In this film, Ben…
On a crowded Brooklyn street, an Orthodox Jew adjusts his yarmulke, a tefillin bag under his arm. He speaks on a smartphone and practically struts. The man, as dandified as one can look in a black suit and a white shirt, is a red herring in Menashe. Several other Brooklynites,…
In one sense, Steven Spielberg’s 1977 UFO bliss-out, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, is reprehensible. It is, after all, the story of a daydreamer dad (Richard Dreyfuss) who leaves his family for worlds unknown as he continually trades in one slender, luminous life companion for another: Teri Garr for…
In adapting for the screen the long, hard story of Colin Warner — a Trinidadian native who, as a Brooklyn teenager in 1980, was wrongfully convicted of murder and sent to prison for more than 20 years — Matt Ruskin’s Crown Heights moves along in a counterproductive hurry. Scenes rich…
Twin Peaks: The Return airs Sundays on Showtime Live long enough, and people may surprise you. The biggest pricks you grew up with — the bullies or blowhards or preening kings of the high school — grow up, too. Sometimes they even turn out all right. Sometimes they’re even stung,…
The story beats of Patti Cake$, a socioeconomic-sermonizing comedy about a thick young white woman with huge hip-hop dreams and little prospects, are as predictable as the ticking of an egg timer, as generic and tinny as the pulses of a drum machine. I rooted not for Patricia Dombrowski (Danielle…
Say what you will about James Cameron, but the man commits. Stories of the director’s perfectionism, his control-freak mania and his sheer drive are legion, but I’m talking about something more fundamental to the work itself. Whereas most action filmmakers are content to let emotion and morality take a backseat…
A grating protagonist alone does not a bad film make, but the episodic, unsatisfying Lemon revels in purposeful nails-on-a-chalkboard unlikability. Isaac (Brett Gelman), a struggling actor and stage director, spins out of control after his girlfriend, Ramona (Judy Greer), leaves him. Another film would make the ensuing tale a mope-fest,…
Like any good set of tragic heroes, the 1988 Carter Cowboys reached fantastic heights before they fell. During the fall and winter of that year, a team loaded with players who went on to play football at big-time colleges and in the NFL cruised to Dallas ISD’s first football state championship…
Aubrey Plaza is a national treasure, but the movies still haven’t figured out what to do with her. Ingrid Goes West comes close, though, with its twisted, of-the-moment tale of an Instagram stalker who infiltrates the personal life of a social media celebrity. But for all its many virtues, it…
In one of two new action films Noomi Rapace leads this summer, she plays seven different women — sisters — in a dystopian future in which single-child policies are stringently and violently enforced because of food-and-resource shortages (let’s be honest: global warming). This is Netflix’s What Happened to Monday. In…
Whitney: Can I Be Me premieres on Aug. 25 on Showtime In the February 2016 issue of ESPN The Magazine, Danyel Smith penned a powerful essay on Whitney Houston’s chill-inducing rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Super Bowl XXV, perhaps the pinnacle of national anthem performances. Smith frames Houston as…
