From the trailer, and just from its initial vibe, Joel Edgerton’s directorial debut The Gift looks like your stock “When bad things happen to good people” thriller, complete with a soulful pet dog you just know is going to get it. But dog lovers, and everyone else, should know that…
Some of the best love songs are those whose lyrics perch precariously between “I adore you, let’s be happy forever” and “I’m miserable without you, where have you gone?” Together, the melody and words of Kurt Weill and Ogden Nash’s 1943 ballad “Speak Low” take the shape of a vaporous…
It’s been 32 years since the release of National Lampoon’s Vacation, in which Chevy Chase, as dad Clark Griswold, packed his Griswold clan into what looked like a Country Squire from Hell and sought the family-bonding experienceTM by driving cross-country to a mythical mega — amusement park known as Walley…
There’s probably only one humanist film that opens with the words “Merry Christmas Eve, bitch!” accompanied by the proffering of a single, sprinkle-dusted doughnut. In Sean Baker’s Tangerine, best friends, transgender women, and prostitutes Sin-Dee and Alexandra (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor) catch up at a doughnut joint on…
The opening of Antoine Fuqua’s Southpaw, shot in gritty, grayed-out tones, is a grim harbinger: A fighter getting ready for the ring holds up his meaty paws for the ritualistic wrapping of gauze and tape. His gloves are slipped over the wrappings, and then they’re taped on too — but…
The problem with clamoring for more woman-led comedies is that actual comedy may be the thing that ends up being left by the wayside. Tina Fey, among others, has railed against the boneheaded dictum that women can’t be funny. But in the current climate of watchfulness — one in which…
There’s no one right way to show mental illness in the movies, yet there are hundreds of ways to get it wrong. Even though certain disorders come with specific traits, a diagnosis is not a human being, and doomed is the actor who just cycles through symptoms, rather than working…
The death of Amy Winehouse, in July 2011, at age 27, was one of the first great tragedies of 21st-century pop music, an event — like the deaths of Tupac Shakur and Kurt Cobain in the last decade of the 20th — that emphasized the jarring contrast between the fragility…
Hollywood lives by the simple, sad axiom “Where there’s money, there’s more money,” which is how we get remakes of movies that sometimes shouldn’t have been made in the first place, two Spider-Man reboots within five years, and a Star Wars franchise that ensures our children’s children will revere George…
Some movies are indefensible, and Ted 2 is one of them. Not only is this a movie about a libidinous, foul-mouthed stuffed bear; it’s the sequel to an earlier movie about a libidinous, foul-mouthed stuffed bear. But I laughed and laughed at Ted 2 — as I did at the…
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl may not be the best teen cancer weepie ever made, if there even is a best teen cancer weepie. But it’s surely the most adorable, for better or worse — less like The Fault in Our Stars and more like Diary of a…
In Jurassic World, Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic Park reboot — set 22 years after dinosaurs started walking the Earth, again — brontosauruses, stegosauruses, and velociraptors have become old hat, sort of like the mechanical Abe Lincoln at Disneyland. Meanwhile, the habitat around them has gone Vegas: Isla Nublar, home of the…
What does the world sound like when you’re Brian Wilson? When you’ve made a record that sounds like cirrus clouds look — as Wilson did with the Beach Boys’ small modern miracle of harmony, the 1966 Pet Sounds — all bets are off when it comes to the way ordinary…
As a middle-aged woman, I rarely have a conversation with other middle-aged women in which the subject of movies “for us” fails to come up. As a critic, I don’t really think of movies in terms of which ones are “for” me and which are not, but I know what…
Fictional movies that tackle topical subjects often have about them the fusty air of a civics lesson, as if we’re supposed to watch while pretending we’re not being led down the path of righteousness. But writer-director Andrew Niccol’s Good Kill is something else; it’s immediate and vital, and it doesn’t…
CANNES, France — “Je m’appelle Max.” Now that’s an opening line, so much better in French, and it’s just one reason I’m glad I waited to see Mad Max: Fury Road here in Cannes on the morning of the festival’s second day, Thursday, rather than at home in the States…
Some people complain about sequels to beloved movies, while others welcome the possibility that a part deux might be even better than the first. Sometimes that happens: While The Godfather is great, The Godfather: Part II expands on its dramatic intensity without repeating any of the same tricks, and The…
S ofía Vergara is built like an amphora, a living testament to the form ceramicists throughout the centuries have adored. In the fleet and gloriously ridiculous comedy Hot Pursuit, Vergara plays Daniella Riva, a mobster’s wife who needs to be escorted from San Antonio to Dallas, where she’ll testify against…
Iris Apfel isn’t exactly a household name, unless we’re talking about very stylish households. From 1950 to 1992, Apfel ran Old World Weavers, the business she cofounded with her husband, Carl, which faithfully re-created antique textiles for use in home decorating. From grand Park Avenue drapes to demure White House…
Depending upon whom you talk to, we live in an era of conformity or one of anything-goes individuality; in a golden age of television or the brightest of movie galaxies. But just about everyone will agree that we’re ruled by screens of all sizes, which means it’s harder than ever…
Though it’s hard to believe in 2015, there was a time when fictional heroines didn’t have to be role models, when a character’s backbone could be more than just a row of vertebrae lined up into teachable moments. It’s wonderful that modern readers love Jane Austen — we still warm…
It’s nearly impossible to persuade the average American citizen, especially if he’s a straight man, that haute couture has a reason to exist. The phrase isn’t just a catchall for “really expensive clothes,” as it’s commonly misunderstood, but a specific term for clothes made entirely by hand, for a specific…
