Where were you when you learned that you’d be making your DJ debut at the biggest rave of the year? And that said rave was only eight hours away? Ethan, the sheepish main character of Netflix’s straight-to-streaming EDM movie XOXO, gets the news in his kitchen, where his mom is cooking breakfast…
Opening your film on the image of a child plummeting off a cliff, presumably to his death, is a fairly foolproof way of getting the audience’s attention. And Alexandre Aja’s hyper-stylized coming-of-age-movie-slash-fantasy-slash-psychological-thriller The 9th Life of Louis Drax excels at grabbing you with a steady stream of provocative and ornate…
Were we wrong to root for Kevin Smith? When he burst onto the scene in 1994, it was the most improbable of rags-to-riches movie narratives: bankrolling Clerks by selling his comic book collection and running up thousands of dollars in credit card debt. Almost overnight, he joined the likes of…
The attempt to reconcile the personal with the political has been the great theme of Nanni Moretti’s cinema, as it was for many of the legendary Italian directors before him. In Mia Madre, it finds one of its more vivid examinations. The film’s concept is blunt — a director struggles…
Nepotism is occasionally a positive, and not just for the direct beneficiary. Ridley Scott gave us Alien, with heroine Ripley and a memorable cast of ne’er-do-wells and villains with defined personalities. And now Scott’s son, Luke, who’s been shadowing his dad on his last few big-budget films, has delivered unto…
Tension and release is the driving principle of a tearjerker, where every good fortune is countered by something worse. And as dismissive as critics often are of the genre, it’s actually quite difficult for a director to make people cry en masse and genuinely feel things. Derek Cianfrance’s foreboding melodrama…
You can be forgiven for thinking that the new show from Dan Harmon, creator of Community and Rick and Morty, might come off as niche. Available on the new comedy streaming service Seeso, Harmonquest features comedians playing Pathfinder — a tabletop role-playing game similar to Dungeons and Dragons — in…
It’s hard out there for a TV comedy fan. That’s the case for network television, at least. Before All in the Family altered the TV comedy landscape, most sitcoms hewed closely to the formula of solving minor annoyances in 22 minutes (with the occasional “OMG Vincent Price in Hawaii” curveball)…
The sarcastic wag who first drawled the phrase “as exciting as watching grass grow” never intended it as a compliment. But have you ever actually watched grass grow? I mean, I haven’t either, but there must be a pretty cool hidden world of fresh-smelling earth and tickly dew and bugs…
Barbara Kopple’s Miss Sharon Jones! tells the kind of true story that makes you want to kick creation itself square in the crotch. Here’s that firecracker soul singer, nearing her 60s, her boogie still majestic, her band still a tight retro marvel, her wail still the southern end of a northbound…
Catherine Corsini’s lovely, sultry Summertime, a 1971-set tale about two women of different ages and class backgrounds who fall in love, celebrates erotic abandon but never loses its mind. Unlike Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013), France’s most notorious treatment of a sapphic sentimental education, Corsini’s movie, which…
Critics often dismiss blockbuster entertainments with the vague, half-assed complaint that they resemble “video games.” Movies like Fede Alvarez’s Don’t Breathe reveal games’ actual influence — for the better. The breakthrough with studio horror films in recent years, since the found-footage boom, is a welcome environmental immersiveness. It’s a testament…
Brady Corbet has emerged as the face of millennial malaise on the strength of roles in films like Simon Killer, Clouds of Sils Maria and Melancholia, but what he really wants to do is direct — and direct he does in The Childhood of a Leader, his ambitious behind-the-camera debut…
Robert De Niro — the Raging Bull himself, now aged from boxer to trainer — is introduced in Hands of Stone bathed in Madison Square Garden’s overhead spotlights, more the image of a reigning champ than the promising fighter whose American debut his character Ray Arcel has come to see…
Natalie Portman proves herself a filmmaker of intelligence, ambition and inventiveness in her debut as a director and writer — just not one who is always certain as a storyteller. A Tale of Love and Darkness adapts, with a passionate somberness, several threads from Amos Oz’s autobiographical novel of the…
Just like there’s a bizarro internet where Donald Trump is celebrated as a warm, loving, generous, successful businessman who really wants to earn a Purple Heart, I wonder if there’s also a bizarro, ravenous audience awaiting a feature-film reenactment of Donald and Melania’s epic first date. (He literally tricked his…
In a summer of disappointing reboots, underperforming sequels and rejected franchise bait, Ben-Hur is something rare: a remake no one asked for but weary moviegoers might accept as a small gift for lack of any better option. Timur Bekmambetov’s reimagining of William Wyler’s 1959 epic, itself preceded by two silent…
Once, American comedies concerned underdog heroes who challenged the status quo and seized the territory of the upper-class characters who thought they were in control. Slobs vs. snobs. During the wartime administration of the lesser President Bush, the wealthy thoroughly dominated the culture, occupying America the way the army patrolled…
Hell or High Water sees a Scottish director making a down-home, West Texas–set movie about cars, guns, brothers, banks and twist-off beers. But this outsider’s perspective is nothing new for David Mackenzie, who has worked with Ashton Kutcher and Anne Heche on a Los Angeles romance about a gigolo (2009’s…
Anna Gunn actually gets to do things in Meera Menon’s expansive high-finance drama Equity, which is almost reason enough to recommend it right there. The Breaking Bad co-star tears into the role of a rainmaking banker taking a Silicon Valley company public. For once it’s Gunn whose character gets to…
From its opening image — of a distraught woman battling massive ocean waves on a moonlit night — to its surprisingly ambiguous final shot — of what, I won’t say — Kubo and the Two Strings sears itself into your brain. The stop-motion animation studio Laika has perfected, over the…
Late in Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World, his unsurprisingly wry, quizzical documentary survey on life inside and beside the virtual world, Werner Herzog stumps two brain researchers with a lyrical question in that instantly recognizable (and often parodied) German accent: “Does the internet dream of itself?” An ever-adventurous…
