Here’s an experiment. Tonight, after midnight, haul yourself out of bed and into the street and, for a minute or two, scream bloody murder. What would happen? Would neighbors call the cops? Would patriots dash out locked and loaded? Would anyone even hear you over their earbuds and white-noise machines?…
Hey. Do you guys remember puppet comedian Jeff Dunham, whose downtrodden Mexican “on a steeeek” character José Jalapeño delighted many a middle-class white American in the ’90s? Well, imagine he blazed up a joint with Bill Maher, wrote a manifesto on atheism and then made a multimillion-dollar animated feature film…
The Bronx is burning in the introductory episodes of The Get Down, Netflix’s new series that presents as urban-cinematic fable the genesis of rap. The cluttered, over-caffeinated 90-minute pilot, directed by creator and executive producer Baz Luhrmann, takes place in the summer of 1977, when a serial killer terrorized New…
Ellen Page’s complicated onscreen relationship with children continues in Tallulah, which reverses the Juno dynamic — this time her title character wants a kid who isn’t hers. Orange Is the New Black scribe Sian Heder makes her directorial debut with the sympathetic indie, a maternal character study that loses its…
Allison Janney is deflecting questions about herself to proclaim the talent and intelligence of her Tallulah co-star Ellen Page, whom she already step-mothered onscreen in 2007’s Juno, when she suddenly interrupts herself. “Oh my god,” she says. “I’ve been talking since six this morning. I’m bleary-eyed from all the conversations…
On both an emotional and narrative level, a Hirokazu Kore-eda film pulls you in slowly, almost unexpectedly. The acclaimed Japanese director, whose works include After Life (1998), Still Walking (2008) and Like Father, Like Son (2013), makes movies about things like loss, abandonment and death, but his distinct touch —…
This quietly moving doc has a hook worthy of the most shameless of Hollywood weepies, offering tragedy and a miracle and much ado about the power of movies themselves. But the film is tender and patient, as fascinated by the challenges of daily life as it is by the dramatic…
Do we call Anthropoid a thriller? Sean Ellis’ earnest, day-ruining WWII bullet-a-thon is rooted in fact but comes on like pulp fiction in its first reels, hitting secret-mission story beats old enough to have served in the big war. As freedom fighters Josef (Jamie Dornan) and Jan (Cillian Murphy) skulk…
With unflagging honesty and compassion, Clay Tweel’s documentary Gleason charts the journey of former New Orleans Saints safety Steve Gleason as he copes with the ruinous nerve disease ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease. That description, however, can’t quite do justice to Tweel’s film, which is partly built around video journals…
In his latest family portrait, Our Little Sister, Hirokazu Kore-eda chronicles roughly a year in the life of the Koda clan — or what’s left of it. When, years ago, her father left for another woman and their mother subsequently abandoned the family to live her own life, Sachi (Haruka…
Stephen Frears’ Florence Foster Jenkins is a likable study of delusions of grandeur. Working from real-life material, Frears creates an alternately funny and mysterious portrait of someone whom most viewers either don’t know at all or regard as an odd footnote in musical history. We first see Florence (Meryl Streep)…
Pete’s Dragon is as cuddly as the mountains of plush toys Disney hopes to sell from it. A disarmingly homespun blockbuster, this loose remake of the studio’s 1977 live-action/animation hybrid is perhaps best defined by all the things it’s not: It’s not a soaring action flick, nor an indulgence in…
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, published in 1943, might stand as a children’s classic, but it’s not-so-secretly a story for grown-ups. Kids have long been drawn to the book’s dreamy sense of wonder, to the golden-haired star-child of the title, but Saint-Exupéry’s ruminations on regret, solitude and loss belong…
“The world changed when Superman flew across the sky,” Viola Davis’ Amanda Waller says early on in Suicide Squad. “And then it changed again when he didn’t,” she continues, over somber images of the Man of Steel’s funeral following his (non-)death at the end of Batman v. Superman. Luckily, that…
Writer Keith Gessen once said that Philip Roth wasn’t a misogynist and didn’t hate women because he spent all his time “thinking about fucking them.” But he did concede that Roth probably thought “women were a foreign country.” In James Schamus’ debut feature Indignation, an adaptation of a late Roth…
You can have your houses of cards, your Jessica Joneses, your wet hot American summers. The Netflix original with its finger firmest on the pulse of our fraught current moment? It comes from Germany, comprises three feature-length “episodes,” and commences its tale more than a quarter-century ago. NSU: Germany History…
Just over a minute into the third season of the Netflix animated comedy BoJack Horseman, an entertainment-news interviewer asks our hero, “What would an Oscar nomination mean for BoJack Horseman?” The rest of the season is dedicated to answering that question, tracking BoJack (voiced by Will Arnett) from press junkets…
Alec Baldwin is no Steve Harvey. Unlike Harvey, Baldwin seems diminished on the set of a retro ’70s game show dedicated to getting contestants to say gently dirty nonsense. On ABC’s baggy, boozy Match Game, Baldwin crabs into a skinny last-century microphone about how everything’s stupid: his celebrity panelists, the…
Alex Gibney will be ready if the power grids fail. “We have a place in Maine now,” the director says. “We just installed solar panels. We can fish. We have water. With a little bit of Sterno, we’ll probably be OK.” After a long career dredging up the dark side…
The ludicrous but amusing teen social-media thriller Nerve is committed to pinning its characters into a world we understand as ours. It opens with Skype, Spotify, Gmail and Chrome, all on the MacBook screen of a mousily beautiful teen, Vee (Emma Roberts), who you just know is one horrific adventure…
Few of us live our lives in widescreen. Instead, the frames in which our days play out tend to be tight and personal, the vistas only occasional. We see what we need to, what’s before us, what we actually inhabit. That truth has long been the source of a distracting…
Steve Allen didn’t know what to make of Frank Zappa. The clean-cut young musician was promising to “play the bicycle” on the set of The Steve Allen Show in 1963, spinning the wheels and tapping on the spokes. The result, with the help of a tuneless orchestra behind him and…
