Almost no one ever asks young women what they desire — in movies or reality. Feminine cravings are still seen as a dire threat, a grand disturbance to the power structure, and the few movie men who dare speak the words “What do you want?” — like Noah in The…
Shirley MacLaine has been described by press and co-stars over the years as “rude,” “nasty,” “difficult” and “selfish.” Hell, she’s called herself impatient, caustic and much worse. None of that has stopped her from being a fiery mainstay in American screwball comedies and dramas. Her signature pixie cut came to…
There’s a reason Zoey Deutch is often “the girl” in comedies. Her face expresses multitudes, and the funny guys need a woman with priceless reactions to sell their punch lines. She’s endured dick jokes for Robert De Niro and Zac Efron in Dirty Grandpa, played oblivious straight woman to the…
In director Amma Asante’s epic political romance A United Kingdom, David Oyelowo and Rosamund Pike star as Seretse and Ruth Khama, the interracial royal couple who stunned the world when they fought to rule the country that would become the Republic of Botswana. The story’s a wildly interesting history lesson…
In 1902, Dr. John Kellogg changed two letters in the word “sanatorium” — defined as a resting spot for disabled soldiers — and changed the world. “Sanitariums” became the health resort of choice for the wealthy and weary, instilling in the privileged a sense that they were perpetually ill, and…
Contemporary American horror’s obsession with morality and psychotherapy can really be a downer. In 2002, Gore Verbinski expertly remade the J-horror hit Ringu with a layered story about a single mother (Naomi Watts) who watches a cursed videotape. To stop the curse, she travels through the warped psyche of the…
Mary Tyler Moore, who died Wednesday at 80, was a reluctant feminist. She wouldn’t even call herself one at all. In 1970, when Moore embodied the character of flighty, 30-year-old single TV news producer Mary Richards on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, there was no other such woman portrayed on…
Gold’s value lies chiefly in the hearts and minds of those who seek it. The noble metal has driven humans to perpetrate ignoble acts on their quests to unearth it since at least 5000 B.C.E., when slaves divined for golden veins to lavish their Pharaohs with jewelry. The Incas even…
It’s a question the movies ask again and again: How should a person grieve? In Annie J. Howell and Lisa Robinson’s slow-burn pseudo-mystery Claire in Motion, a talented mathematics professor named Claire Hunger (Betsy Brandt) realizes her amateur survivalist husband Paul (Chris Beetem) might not be coming home from his…
I shouldn’t have to explain why Fences, the August Wilson play set in the 1950s and now adapted for the screen, is important. If you’ve stepped anywhere near the theater — and I mean the playhouse here — you’ve read, seen, or heard about it. Wilson, who didn’t study theater…
In the pantheon of American First Ladies, Jacqueline Kennedy was no Eleanor Roosevelt. She didn’t push for policy, didn’t relinquish her pillbox hat to walk among the needy, didn’t travel to foreign countries as an ambassador and certainly didn’t advise her husband on matters of war. Jackie Kennedy’s role was…
In this, the harrowing year of 2016, I could jump into the Oscars talk. I could pick groundbreaking films that reminded me time and again that movies are alive and more vital than ever, like the heartbreaking Moonlight, the soul-stirring Queen of Katwe, the force-of-goodness 13th, the subtle and sweet…
Eventually, there will be so many films about a sullen or damaged man returning to his provincial town to face the demons of his past that Netflix will make a separate category for them. At their worst, these movies are navel-gazing vanity projects for their writers and directors (Cameron Crowe,…
Oh man, are we in a backlash on liberal, PC culture right now. I mean, if you can call electing the KKK’s and Nazi party’s greatest white hope to the highest office in the world a backlash. I can’t even count how many people — strangers, family, trolls — have…
Aisholpan Nurgaiv has never met this eagle she’s posing with — borrowed from a local animal wrangler — on a balcony at the London Hotel in West Hollywood. In 90-degree heat, she’s a 15-year-old girl sweating in her Mongolian winter clothes, including a hat made from the first fox she…
Sure, teen comedies make stars of their leading ladies and fellas, but what about the authority figures? Eugene Levy’s nameless dad in American Pie is peripheral but memorable as a bumbly guiding force. Tina Fey’s Ms. Norbury in Mean Girls is a motherly but revelatory mess of a teacher. Harry…
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…
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…
When Sarah Waters published her gothic lesbian suspense novel Fingersmith in early 2002, the U.S. was beginning a relatively speedy transformation on the LGBT front, building to today’s legalized same-sex marriage and a presidential candidate’s full-throated support for expanded LGBT rights. Buoyed by that shift, Waters’ story of clandestine female lovers…
An archeologist, a North Korean dictator, a Norse god, two photographers, the people of Indonesia and a tribal chief who believes Jesus is actually black American WWII soldier John Frum all look into a volcano and see their fates. That’s not the beginning of a joke; it’s the premise of…
Writer/director Osgood Perkins has been peeking at my Shirley Jackson book collection, and he’s already read through my favorites: The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Jackson, who penned chilling ghost stories and moral tales in the ‘40s, ’50s and ’60s — like her…
“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,…
