Benghazi is a hashtag battle-cry, a call to arms that many Americans don’t understand. Unlike the simplicity of “Remember the Alamo!” a bleat of “Benghazi!” still has people wondering, “Wait, what happened? And why are we mad?” Michael Bay’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi has an explanation, though…
Critics rarely receive love from filmmakers. Last year’s Best Picture Oscar winner, Birdman, featured a vengeful harpy of a theater reviewer (played by Lindsay Duncan) hellbent on annihilating a play before she’d even seen it. Birdman was joined in its release year by other unfair portraits of critics in Top…
Alan Rickman has died at the age of 69. To Americans of a certain generation, he’ll always be Hans Gruber from Die Hard; to those of a slightly fresher vintage, he’ll never not be Severus Snape. But it was his ability to transcend the typecasting of those iconic roles that…
MTV’s The Shannara Chronicles is gorgeous and lunkheaded, gory and hilarious, sometimes awful and sometimes full of awe. It’s also quite welcome: Just as Terry Brooks tore the pompousness out of Tolkien with his pulpy, brick-thick Shannara novels, the series – executive produced by Jon Favreau – shows your Game…
Dallas doesn’t get many world movie premiers, not to mention ones that have potential to change the trajectory of presidential elections. That made last night’s world premier of 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, Michael Bay’s slick but effective movie of the siege of Benghazi in 2012, and event…
About three months ago, Dealey Plaza near the West End was pretty much shut down thanks to J.J. Abrams and James Franco. They were filming for a Hulu thriller series, 11.22.63, based on Stephen King’s book by the same name. You were either really mad at all the traffic it was causing…
Charlie Kaufman is a cartographer of the soul. You can picture him hunched over parchment accurately inking each dark river and, off to the side, cautioning that there be dragons. What makes Kaufman cinema’s best psychoanalyst is a contradiction. He sees people for who we are — hurtful, hopeful, lovely,…
Don’t let that title throw you. Joe Frank and Zachary Reed’s rambling neighborhood comedy Sweaty Betty isn’t dopey or sweaty, and I don’t recall meeting anyone in it named Betty. There is a 1,000-pound hog named Miss Charlotte, decked out in Washington Redskins gear, but that vision’s just one of…
The seventh episode of Transparent’s second season, now available on Amazon, takes place on Yom Kippur. The holiest day of the year in the Hebrew calendar, it’s a holiday on which Jews fast to symbolically atone for their sins. It’s also a significant occasion for Transparent, which, like the Pfefferman…
In the current noble vogue of admirable female figures in documentaries, now comes Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict by Lisa Immordino Vreeland. Guggenheim may not be news to the art world, but for the rest of us the film might stir wishful nostalgia for a breakthrough time in cultural history —…
Somewhere between season two and season three of Game of Thrones I quit. It was too evil and rape-y for my squeamish brain. But one thing I loved about the show was the theme music. It fit perfectly with the show’s sinister, yet magisterial mood. Fast forward to last week…
Star Wars has warmed up box offices hotter than a Tatooine summer, and fans are going back to relive The Force Awakens experience to the fevered tune of 1.39 billion in global sales. As the film continues to dominate theaters with spaceship cameos and warm-hearted Wookiee hugs, detractors have begun…
Making a Murderer has only been out for two weeks and the Internet is already lit up by intense reactions from angry viewers who managed to binge watch all ten episodes of the documentary series, holiday season be damned. Set in Wisconsin, the protagonist is Steven Avery, who was released…
JoJo Fletcher’s life is about to change. Tonight. Tonight is the night her entire existence is about to change. We are excited. Just kidding, we are terrified for her. Fletcher is one of the 28 bachelorettes on ABC’s The Bachelor, vying for Bachelor Ben’s attention. All of that is nice…
One of our most enduring cinematic genres, horror is also among the most difficult to do right. This may sound obvious — countless attempts are made to scare moviegoers every year, whether in theaters or, increasingly, streaming online — but it’s brought into focus by the few that actually make…
As cinematic year 2015 reaches its end, the FOMO specter threatens to haunt us all. If you pored over the results of our film poll and felt aghast at how many apparently great movies you’ve yet to see, here at last is a chance to catch up without braving traffic. About…
Here’s to Quentin Tarantino’s cussed perversity. The Hateful Eight, his intimate suspenseful Western splatter-horror comedy, has been shot at great expense in the long-gone 70mm format, but the movie itself is set almost entirely in cramped interiors. He’s hired Ennio Morricone to score the thing, but don’t expect rousing new…
What’s been missing for years in Hollywood’s adventure films? Verisimilitude. Correspondent with the rise of the computers, and the ability to show us any place that filmmakers can imagine, has been the fall of immersiveness — that sense that the actors are in a place you can’t go yourself rather…
Here’s a challenge. Gather some friends, pour some drinks and announce to everyone the premise of Daddy’s Home, the new family comedy about dads competing to be pater superior. It won’t take long: Will Ferrell is a doting schlemiel of a stepdad to suburban moppets whose biological father, played by…
In most of his eight films and especially since The Fighter (2010), choreographer of chaos and screwball scion David O. Russell has assembled boisterous, buoyant casts. His manic ensemble players, like those in Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, carom off one another, their high-pitched energy keeping the movies bustling…
Concussion isn’t much of a movie, but it’s a fascinating bellwether for where the National Football League currently stands on chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the degenerative brain disease associated with many of its former players. As it happens, the brain isn’t supposed to whip against the skull like humans are…
Fueled by impotent, blustery outrage, Adam McKay’s The Big Short, about the grotesque banking and investing practices that led to the 2008 financial collapse, is about as fun and enlightening as a cranked-up portfolio manager’s rue-filled comedown after an energy-shot bender. Based on Michael Lewis’ 2010 bestselling book of the…
