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…
Ralph Rainger and Leo Robin’s sweet nectarine of a jazz standard “Easy Living” figures, in a glancing yet potent way, in Todd Haynes’ Carol, adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt. Even though the lyrics speak of contentment — “Living for you is easy living/It’s easy to…
Lurid, muscular and unafraid to look at turn-of-the-century Manhattan’s rotting guts, The Knick has distinguished itself in the crowded antihero-drama landscape through its mosaic portrait of a city on the verge of implosion and epidemic — detailed with an extraordinary visual expressiveness (courtesy of Steven Soderbergh, who directs every episode)…
How good was 2015 for movies? My first draft of a top 10 was a staggering top 30. I had to make some agonizing cuts and punt by giving documentaries their own sidebar — this year, they’ve earned it. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it: Watch every one…
George Lucas is the L. Ron Hubbard of Hollywood. Both men were sci-fi dreamers turned mega-millionaires who spun their pulp adventures into a religion. Tap the power within yourself, they urged. The faithful forked over their dollars. Then both Lucas and Hubbard mucked up their simple premise with add-ons like…
Life is hard for the extravagantly wealthy lounging about in one of the world’s most beautiful hotels. Paolo Sorrentino’s latest, Youth, might seem easy to mock — here, after all, are Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel, playing a composer and a film director, moping in a Swiss spa about old…
No sentence distills the essence of one strain of cinephilia — mine especially — better than this one: “Motion pictures are for people who like to watch women.” Bracing in its profound simplicity, this line was written in 1983 by Boyd McDonald (1925-1993), author of the essential collection Cruising the…
Here’s a true story about a St. Louis murder that changed America. In 1837, a black freeman named Francis McIntosh stepped off a Mississippi riverboat and blundered into two white cops chasing a drunk sailor who’d called them names. They ordered McIntosh to stop the perp; when he refused, they…
This year turned out to be a challenging one for couch potatoes. In 2015, the “more programming, more problems” state of television held just as true for viewers as it did for network executives; there was simply too much to watch. But this year of Peak TV has delivered some…
Chances are you don’t yet know who Kylo Ren is, and what he means to the plot of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Children have not yet had the chance to re-create his on-screen action with their action figures. But the adults, who would rather keep them boxed for future…
As we approach the end of another year in moviegoing — and as the industry prepares for its annual spasm of awards and accolades — it seems an apt time to look ahead. Here are 10 films you won’t want to miss in 2016. 1. The Invitation (Dir. Karyn Kusama)…
What’s quietly revolutionary about Sisters is that it’s a dumb party movie like a million others. The hosts score booze, invite over dozens of friends and frenemies and then watch in horror — and a touch of self-congratulatory awe — as their house gets trashed. With the sunrise come lessons,…
A while back, a friend expressed concern that her son, a 10-year-old, was watching too much My Little Pony. “It’s sweet,” she said, “but not what I’d choose.” I asked what she would prefer that he watch. “Well, his dad started him on that new Star Wars cartoon.” That cartoon…
