Before we get into the matter of Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, we must first address the issue of the man actually playing Jack Reacher. Resolved: Tom Cruise has absolutely nothing in common physically with author Lee Child’s crime-solving ex-military drifter. Cruise is famously diminutive; Reacher is famously tall and…
As has been widely noted, Woody Allen’s Crisis in Six Scenes isn’t really a television series; its six episodes are not particularly self-contained, and plot developments crest and climax willy-nilly regardless of where each segment ends. It’s a two-and-a-half-hour movie, the longest one Allen’s ever made, and with the option…
The month before Fish Tank writer/director Andrea Arnold premiered her film American Honey at this year’s edition of the Cannes Film Festival (where it won the Jury Prize), she spoke before an audience with director Ira Sachs as part of the Tribeca Film Festival. The following are excerpts of her remarks, edited for clarity…
Fred Armisen and Bill Hader are a rarity in the comedy world: funny people with hearts of gold. It was obvious all those years when they were cast members on Saturday Night Live. They handled their characters — whether living, dead or purely fictional — with a visible sweetness. Think…
Here’s what matters most: You will laugh. Kevin Hart on a stage before thousands, yapping for more than an hour? I don’t care what kind of miserable killjoy you are, you’re going to laugh. There are two reasons you might be offended — you may find the material either too…
There’s plenty of time to wonder, as J.K. Simmons narrates page after page of backstory, whether the creators of The Accountant realized that their dutifully twisty R-rated thriller was actually another superhero story. Yes, it’s got trappings of psychology and adult thoughtfulness, speeches about the mysteries of the brain and…
“As it always happens in the Chris Guest movies, we really don’t talk to each other before we get to set,” Jane Lynch says, explaining how she creates her menagerie of characters, specifically Gabby Monkhouse from Guest’s newest mockumentary, Mascots. “A couple months before, I got a call from Chris,…
Christopher Guest’s films mostly deal with passionate but ordinary people who aspire to positions of status within strange little subcultures: mid-century folk music, dog shows, community theater or, in the case of his new mockumentary, Mascots, the world of sports-mascot competitions. In the alternate universe of Guest’s first film in…
When a quiet film is set outside of the big cities, it’s often called a “slice of life.” But that’s ultimately a condescending designation; to the millions of people residing on the prairies and in the small towns dotting the throughways, it is simply life, with a capital “L.” In…
Adults in 2016 know not to feed the trolls. If you have to, though, you need to come on hard and strong, publicly glutting them on so much truth that they just curl up and die under their bridges/in their comment threads. So it goes in Mick Jackson’s patient, heartening…
Horror has in recent years been so informed by found footage, smartphones and Skype that a trend toward folklore was probably inevitable. Far from trying to capture the moment, arthouse movies like The Babadook, It Follows and now Demon aspire to a kind of timelessness — what was old has…
What happens when a director takes his own life before he’s able to see his work open in theaters? In the case of Marcin Wrona and Demon, his mesmerizing Polish art-horror film, Olga Szymanska, Wrona’s producing partner and wife, has pressed on. She has traveled with the film, watching the…
You might have let yourself act surprised as the waters have risen and the floods have come. But you can’t anymore, not after 13th, Ava DuVernay’s miraculous cine-history of the criminalization of American blackness. Few films shake and astonish like this one, even though nothing in it should be a…
Mike Judge’s Idiocracy might technically be coming back to theaters for one night only, but for many of us, it’s been running on an endless loop for years. In a world where Donald Trump is a presidential candidate and some cafes are now offering blowjobs with your morning coffee, it’s…
When Relativity Media — the production company/distributor behind Masterminds, the newest vehicle for Zach Galifianakis to do his painfully committed schtick — started getting press, co-founder/co-CEO Ryan Kavanaugh boasted of his secret sauce for success. A proprietary risk-evaluation algorithm that crunched variables like cast, release date, relative examples in the…
Forgiveness is tricky and personal, and you can’t be blamed for not offering it. Buying a ticket to Nate Parker’s slave-revolt drama The Birth of a Nation demands at least some measure of it. As you’ve probably heard, while a student at Penn State, Parker — the film’s star, director…
Half a century after its debut, The Battle of Algiers has a permanent parking spot in the film canon. After taking home the Golden Lion at the 1966 Venice Film Festival, it was nominated for three Academy Awards (one in 1967 and two in 1969, oddly) and now ranks within…
It takes all of two minutes of listening to Emily Blunt’s voiceover in The Girl on the Train before you have to wonder whether this narrator might be unreliable. As her Rachel rides Metro-North in and out of Manhattan, detailing her growing obsession with the ostensibly perfect couple she steals…
Judy Davis doesn’t like the expression “scene-stealing,” even though it precisely describes her performance in The Dressmaker. “I always sort of cringe when I hear that,” she says, “because what it implies is that’s what the actor is after.” So let’s just put it this way: As Kate Winslet’s acerbic,…
A woman wears sunglasses, a tight red dress, matching long gloves and red lipstick. She stands and smokes a cigarette, ostensibly watching a rugby game, but really the players are watching her, fumbling their footwork, and it’s exactly the effect she desires. This early scene, with its shifting gazes and…
The first moments of Luke Cage offer much that the previous 38 or so hours of Marvel superhero Netflix drama haven’t: laughter. Warmth. A sense that the New York City that Daredevil and Jessica Jones mope and brawl through might be more than just a place to save — it…
The conventional wisdom about early-career Tim Burton is that he was an imaginative visual stylist but not a great storyteller. That sounds smart, right? It’s still something that a certain kind of ratty-beard-stroking film critic keeps tucked in his sweater vest in case he needs to say something that sounds…
