Gilbert Gottfried on Showbiz Stupidity and Hollywood Legends

Gilbert Gottfried has been a duck, a parrot, and a scapegoat. Working for an insurance company, AFLAC, and a mega corporation like Disney is all well and good — until you say the wrong thing. Considering the abrasive, brash, and often crude nature of Gottfried’s comedy, it is surprising he…

The Trip to Spain Feasts Upon its Stars’ Fear of Obsolescence

Once more, into the brie — or, in this case, the Manchego. For the third time, now, for Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, it’s the feast as improv proving ground, the sumptuous meal as arena of competitive discernment: Who can better parse and parody the particularities of some beloved British…

Menashe Makes Slacker Comedy Out of Orthodox Life

On a crowded Brooklyn street, an Orthodox Jew adjusts his yarmulke, a tefillin bag under his arm. He speaks on a smartphone and practically struts. The man, as dandified as one can look in a black suit and a white shirt, is a red herring in Menashe. Several other Brooklynites,…

The Hitman’s Bodyguard: A Giddily Irresponsible Action Comedy

Here’s what Patrick Hughes’ The Hitman’s Bodyguard has going for it: It’s exactly the movie it promises to be, but more so. It’s more wild, more hilarious, more giddily irresponsible — it’s the hard R action comedy that kids sneaking into it might imagine it’s going to be, minus ’70s…

Soderbergh Returns at Last With a Breezy, Comic Real-America Heist

In Steven Soderbergh’s hillbilly heist comedy Logan Lucky, the West Virginia prison where vault specialist Joe Bang (Daniel Craig) resides is pristine and peaceful. This is a high-security facility in a seemingly alternate world, a jail without racial tensions where the prisoners feast on edible food. While only a small…

Taylor Sheridan’s Wind River Is a Fine Crime Thriller, With Reservations

Taylor Sheridan isn’t afraid to embrace genre. His Wind River plays more like an unusually well-made episode of CSI: Wyoming than the highly anticipated directorial effort from the screenwriter of Hell or High Water (which may well have been last year’s best-written film). Set in the desolate, snow-covered Wind River…

Simplified Onscreen, The Glass Castle at Least Boasts Strong Performances

The dictates of Hollywood screenwriting can’t quite constrain the wildness of Jeannette Walls’ family and her best-selling memoir. Despite a tidy resolution, too many scenes whose shapes are immediately familiar from other movies, and an absurd climax that dramatizes the conflict between a daughter and her father through the wheezy…

The Dark Tower Looks Bad, But There’s Actually a Bright Side

Yes, you’ve heard it’s bad. It is. But there are some things to like in The Dark Tower, directed by Nikolaj Arcel, the new adaptation of Stephen King’s epic novel series. Just as in the books, an evil sorcerer named The Man in Black (Matthew McConaughey) orders around his henchpeople…

Climate Change Has Damaged Historic Seminole Sites, Archaeologists Say

At the Tidally United Summit, taking place August 4 and 5, a group of archaeologists, geologists, academics, activists, and local legislators will gather at the Native Learning Center in Hollywood to discuss the impact of climate change from an angle that’s often overlooked: its effect on indigenous communities and cultural heritage.

Here’s All the TV Not to Miss This Hot, Dumb August

It’s August, which means it’s even hotter than July and you need TV now more than ever! The planet is hot, but you watching TV in your underwear with a fan pointed directly at your swimsuit parts is even hotter! Have at it! Manhunt: Unabomber, Aug. 1 (Discovery) Essentially, this…

The Al Gore Sequel is More a Tragedy Than an Inconvenience

It’s hard to imagine a less promising film title than An Inconvenient Sequel. Maybe Another Imposition Upon Your Time? It’s clear, in the opening minutes, as we watch him shake off the slights and smears of his critics, that Al Gore is too savvily upbeat a technocrat to give the…

Atomic Blonde: At Least the Fights Are Good

Officially, the brutish thriller Atomic Blonde takes place in Berlin just before and after the toppling of the Wall, in early November 1989. But this seismic event is really just a backdrop for another epochal marker: the decade that saw the birth of MTV and the height of New German…

What Poop Taught Me: I Saw The Emoji Movie Twice

At 5 p.m. Thursday, I became one of the first people in this country to see The Emoji Movie a second time. (Aside, obviously, from the folks who made it — though I’m not entirely sure that some of them actually bothered to see it all the way through once.)…

David Lowery’s A Ghost Story Gets Lost in Time and Space

“Every love story is a ghost story,” David Foster Wallace wrote, more than once. That evocative observation is probed in David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, a film that occasionally reaches a similar level of eloquence. Lowery’s fourth feature reunites Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck, the leads of his second, the…