Jean-Marc Vallée’s Demolition presents an interesting experiment: What if you told a story of tragedy but withheld all the tenderness and emotion from it, so that you were left — at least until the very end — with just literal and figurative wreckage, disconnected fragments seeking to be put back…
Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! is being billed as a “spiritual sequel” to his 1993 high school stoner classic Dazed and Confused, but in some key ways it feels closer to his animated 2001 philosophy bull session Waking Life — a freewheeling grab bag of ideas, ruminations and loose ends…
A she-wolf of Wall Street with a spiky ginger Suze Orman shag, Michelle Darnell, the anti-heroine of fitfully funny The Boss, is the latest of the Rabelaisian wonders played by Melissa McCarthy. The actress specializes in characters with indestructible bravado, no matter where they stand on the socioeconomic ladder; Michelle,…
Some free advice: If you ever find yourself defensively reminding people that you’re not in a cult, you’re probably in a cult. This comes up early and often in The Path, Hulu’s new series premiering on March 30th, not that any adherents of the fictional Meyerist Movement seem fazed by…
Willful ignorance as a character trait typically evokes annoyance in those who witness it — at least in real life. In many French films, however, a character who’s willfully ignorant is portrayed in the twee manner, encouraging us to believe it is their blissful view of the world we should…
Have you ever considered the fact that, in 1951, Hank Williams actually wrote “Hey Good Lookin'”? That, for the first 175 years years of American history, those words and that melody weren’t already part of our shared heritage? Williams didn’t just pluck it out of the air, of course. Cole…
Ask weary WWE viewers to identify why the professional-wrestling titan’s creative direction has gone so stagnant and you’ll hear one answer time and again: lack of competition. It’s no coincidence that the company’s late-‘90s heyday ran concurrent with the rise of Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling, which at one point…
Like the Juggernaut or St. Patrick’s Day drunks, nothing can stop the hundreds of hours of filmed superhero junk that hits our faceholes each year. But rest easy, true believer! Once in a while, the onslaught can still offer surprise and pleasure. A shiver of both hit me minutes into…
Brash yet intimate, writer-director-editor Trey Edward Shults’ observant, unnerving first feature transcends the notion of a “promising debut.” Here, the promise is already fulfilled on the screen, which bustles with chaotic family life — and prickles with anxiety. Krisha is a heartsick family story that plays as psychological horror, its…
The joke was on me when I first saw My Big Fat Greek Wedding back in 2002: I watched the film at a press screening that also happened to be attended by a large group of older female tourists. While I grimaced through the movie’s obvious gags and not-ready-for-prime-time direction,…
Thunderous, ponderous and occasionally exciting, Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice opens with one of those grim proclamations that the creators of modern superhero movies are so fond of: “There was a time above, a time before,” intones the voice of Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck), over a by-now…
Prestige cable flatters us about the past. It lets us vacation in the backwardness of previous generations, usually while throwing some empathetic side-eye. Gape at Mad Men’s blithe white dudes, each convinced he earned every bit of authority he commands over women and minorities. Or thank Jezebel that we’ve evolved…
Take heart, Newsroom fans. If you were hankering for more scenes of Jeff Daniels standing around talking, you’ll find an unlikely ally in the new young-adult sci-fi sequel Allegiant, the third entry in the Divergent series based on Veronica Roth’s hit novels. Too bad the stuff he’s saying is so…
Drone warfare is a moral gray area, and this movie is on it. Gavin Hood’s Eye in the Sky stands alongside Drones and Good Kill as the cinematic equivalent of online commenters shouting “First!” on a hot topic but not bothering to say anything new or insightful about it. As…
Why is it that little movies about being out of step so often wind up feeling the same? Not long into Michael Showalter’s Hello, My Name Is Doris, a comedy about a misfit frump pining for a much younger hunk, the unlikely target of the heroine’s affections muses to his…
The Pee-wee Productions logo that kicks off the new Netflix film Pee-wee’s Big Holiday trumpets comedian-turned-actor Paul Reubens’ comeback as the formerly ubiquitous man-child. Forget about The Pee-wee Herman Show, Reubens’ fan-service-intensive Broadway extravaganza. Big Holiday (which premieres March 18 on Netflix) plays like an un–self-conscious continuation of the character’s…
For the protagonists of cable dramas, sex and death are twin forces of titillation, pressure valves for frustrated middle-aged men or steely-eyed careerists. That’s also true for the audience of cable dramas, of course, but there’s a reason we eagerly pursue onscreen what often makes us squirm in real life:…
In Jeff Nichols’ gripping domestic thriller Take Shelter, Michael Shannon played a family man convinced that Armageddon was upon us. But even as the character’s visions compelled him to take more and more extreme precautions, the film remained fixed in the world of the real. It was a portrait of…
This patchy comedy about a cossetted, obnoxious gymnast who has slid deep into sloth in the decade or so since her Olympic triumph gets an occasional laugh from the American ills it sends up: jingoism, the sports-industrial complex, home-schooling, fast-food gluttony. The scattershot jabs pepper the flaccid storyline of the…
The Brothers Grimsby is a movie for those who thought Kingsman: The Secret Service didn’t go far enough. If all the exploding heads and anal-sex jokes and creative impalements of Matthew Vaughn’s tongue-in-cheek spy thriller didn’t do it for you, rest assured: This time, we get to see British super-agent…
Turns out that the Walker Stalker Con that hit the Dallas convention center last week was not, in fact, devoted to the city’s favorite TV son, Walker, Texas Ranger. Nope. This con was for the fans of The Walking Dead, who came in whatever the collective noun is for the…
Since 2015’s When Marnie Was There looks to be its final new film for the foreseeable future, it makes sense that Studio Ghibli would circle back around to its beginnings. Isao Takahata’s 1991 Only Yesterday was not Ghibli’s first feature, however; it was preceded by Hayao Miyazaki’s 1986 Castle in…
