In 1969, the late, always unpredictable and wacky actor Dennis established himself in the Hollywood system as “Billy” in his co-writing / directed debut, Easy Rider. This rebellious film set the mood for Hopper and the often wild card of roles and projects he would take on for the remainder…
Twenty-year-old Josh’s (Josh Thomas) world explodes twice in the Please Like Me pilot: first when he realizes he’s gay and again when his bipolar mother, Rose (Debra Lawrance), attempts suicide. Josh takes both revelations in stride, though he dreads having to inform his mom, whom he’ll be living with and…
Here’s a scary story for you. Somewhere in Hollywood, a cabal of producers are forever zombie-ing up the corpses of long-dead licensed properties, ever hopeful that you will continue to throw your money at familiar trademarked characters even as they eat your brains. Sometimes, when a silver moon shines just…
In the Golden Age of scripted television, reality TV is supposed to be dying, but you wouldn’t know it from Survivor’s tenacious resilience — or its just-debuted 31st season. The show that launched reality TV as mainstream programming at the turn of the millennium returned two weeks ago with an…
Michael Shannon isn’t a stickler for rules. In his career, he’s ignored most of them, especially the mandate that a theater-trained, Oscar-nominated actor should shun the large roles in dumb movies that let him afford the smart ones. (See: Kangaroo Jack, Bad Boys II, Premium Rush, Man of Steel.) Shannon’s…
Steven Spielberg’s true-story Cold War procedural Bridge of Spies has a wintry chill. The colors are gray and green, the skin tones pale as frozen fish, and the film stock fuzzed and snowy. Our protagonist, James Donovan (Tom Hanks), spends half the movie waylaid by a cold and takes his…
Aaron Sorkin opens up a new desktop icon with Steve Jobs, a briskly busy, talkative companion piece to the Newsroom and Moneyball writer’s Mark Zuckerberg-centric The Social Network. Adapting Walter Isaacson’s biography of the Apple innovator, Sorkin’s latest is less a novel exposé than a distinctly Sorkinian dramatization of well-known…
Mia Wasikowska is proof of reincarnation. The Australian actress must be possessed by the spirit of Lillian Gish. At 22 — the same age that Gish starred in Birth of a Nation — Wasikowska became a bankable name playing the lead in Tim Burton’s garish Alice in Wonderland. In the…
It’s got to be one of the most challenging things to achieve in cinema history: How do you truly frighten the hell out of a movie audience? These days, in the Internet age, wherein we meticulously dissect films for accurate representations of reality and feasibility, it’s hilariously difficult. But when…
You’d have to be a monster not to be sniffling by the end of Peter Sollett’s Freeheld, a weepy/rousing retelling of real-life gay-rights triumph that serves as a helpful reminder that the dark ages were just, like, 10 years ago. It’s love that lights up that darkness, of course, and…
There’s much to sadly shake your head at in Pan, a sort of Peter Pan Begins that manages the unlikely feat of making battles between flying pirate ships a crushing bore. Most miserably, there’s the great heap of action set pieces that are easier to wait out than to track…
Let’s get right down to business: the Lone Star Film Festival announced its 2015 lineup, and it’s big. Here’s a fresh reminder from last year: they screened It Follows, The Babadook, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, The Great Invisible, The Imitation Game, Mr. Turner, Wild, Winter Sleep, and…
Desperation, anxiety, stubbornly saying yes to survival: If grand struggles are your thing, there are plenty in Ridley Scott’s The Martian, based on Andy Weir’s popular novel, which was first self-published in 2011 and then picked up by Crown in 2014. In both novel and movie, American astronaut Mark Watney…
Since 1963, the Austrian birthrate has halved. You can’t blame Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s Goodnight Mommy for the trend, but it sure isn’t helping. The quiet creepshow follows 11-year-old twins Lukas and Elias (Lukas and Elias Schwarz, great), who suspect their mom (Susanne Wuest) wishes they hadn’t been born…
Those of us who have been waiting forever for Joseph Gordon-Levitt to make a musical now have the next best thing: In Robert Zemeckis’ The Walk, this breezy Puck of an actor plays high-wire artist Philippe Petit, who walked the space between the World Trade Center’s twin towers in 1974…
The minds of math and science geniuses have long fascinated the makers of crowd-pleasing narrative features, which is curious, as the complexities that fascinate those minds are antithetical to the feelings-first bounce of popular filmmaking. The movies, having settled into candied naturalism, already struggle to suggest interiority, even of characters…
Some veteran filmmakers try to capture the younger generation and fail to get it right, coming up with characters and faux with-it dialogue that invite lots of “Oh, Mom!” eye-rolling. That’s not the problem with writer-director Nancy Meyers’s The Intern, in which retiree Robert De Niro finds meaning in life…
In the mid-20th century, movie audiences understood the value of a good melodrama: A picture like Now, Voyager or Black Narcissus or almost anything by Douglas Sirk could be an urn into which you could pour your own unarticulated feelings of loss and loneliness. The heightened, unrealistic intensity of those movies…
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,…
James “Whitey” Bulger was more like a character from a 17th-century folktale than a late-20th-century criminal, the sort of figure who’d murder innocents on wooded roadways and then, with a shrug, toss their bloody bones to hungry wild dogs. In ’80s and early-’90s Boston, he headed a criminal syndicate known…
The hardest type of guy for an actor to play is one without charisma. That’s the challenge faced by Tobey Maguire in Edward Zwick’s , which tells the story of Cold War–era chess champ and totally strange human being Bobby Fischer. He’s good at it — maybe too good. In…
Serving Second Chances begins with a gorgeous shot of the Dallas skyline before the camera pans down to a man sleeping on a bench in front of City Hall. During a Robert Johnson lookalike contest at The Stewpot, guitarist Gerald Williams showed up out of nowhere and won first prize…
