Richard Bridgland was given an impossible task: recreate 1970s Hollywood for Shane Black’s buddy conspiracy thriller The Nice Guys … in Atlanta. As a production designer, Bridgland’s had to make the Czech Republic look like 1930s rural North Carolina (Serena), New Orleans look like West Virginia (American Ultra) and a…
As generic and impersonal as a new credit-card offer, Jodie Foster’s Money Monster is the latest big-studio production to try to cash in on populist outrage over Wall Street abuses and New Gilded Age inequality. There’s a lot of excitable talk about algorithms (or “algos”), the overuse of the term…
On the surface, there has been a lot of forward movement on television for black women. We’re now able to see an incredible breadth of black female characters, including Cookie Lyon (Taraji P. Henson) on Empire, Rosalee (Jurnee Smollett-Bell) on Underground and Dr. Rainbow Johnson (Tracee Ellis Ross) on Black-ish…
All actors possess their own personal gateway into becoming a character. Some require deep memory mining (method). Others require lengthy conversations with the director about seemingly unrelated philosophical topics. And some just need a single physical characteristic around which they can develop a character’s entire being. Susan Sarandon is a…
Like The Imitation Game, The Man Who Knew Infinity is a Great Man biopic about a man most viewers have probably never heard of. Srinivasa Ramanujan was a brilliant, self-taught Indian mathematician who in his brief time on this earth made seismic contributions to his field. That he’s largely unknown…
A fractured film about a fractured family, Louder Than Bombs takes a potentially tired premise and reshapes it before our eyes. It opens on a newborn’s tiny hand helplessly clinging to a father’s finger, and ends with a different father watching his two sons sleep. In between is a story…
If nothing else, Captain America: Civil War stands as something of a corrective to this spring’s other superheroes-bludgeoning-each-other opus, Batman v Superman. While that film was severe and downcast, Civil War is expansive, at times even light. BvS strove to redefine its superheroes to fit newer, darker, borderline-sociopathic molds; Civil…
The Grateful Dead performed its final hurrah last summer in Chicago, but Deadheads have another chance to converge with the tribes when the sixth-annual Grateful Dead Meet-Up at the Movies lights up South Florida theaters Wednesday, May 11. This one-night-only event features an unreleased concert filmed at Sullivan Stadium in…
It’s easy to think, based on the marketing, that the first feature film from acclaimed comedy duo Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele will be a hundred minutes of an adorable kitten dressed in a do-rag and gold chain for easy laughs, but Keanu is so so much more than that…
Is it too much to ask that all these holiday-themed rom-coms — Valentine’s Day, New Year’s Eve and now Mother’s Day — one day merge with the Halloween movies? Michael Myers might be the only one in either franchise with a truly cutting response to all the rhetorical musings about relationships romantic,…
If you thought the billionaire played by Steve Carell in Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher was eerie, please allow me to introduce you to the real John du Pont. A dangerous concoction of lonely and paranoid, du Pont was blessed with money and mobility and cursed with the kind of childhood that…
The lure of everything Cuba is strong. It’s in the news, on top of everyone’s travel list and in our movie theaters. But the recent films about Cuba aren’t exports from the still-embargoed country. Most come from visiting filmmakers. Irish director Paddy Breathnach captures a gorgeous portrait of Cuba with…
Score one for going home again. After misfiring with Begin Again, a film that asked us to worry over a disillusioned A&R man’s efforts to coax a folk-pop album out of Keira Knightley, writer-director John Carney has turned back to the striving Irish of Once, his breakout hit. He’s also…
Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room is an impeccably crafted cinematic torture machine — in the best possible way. The premise will make some cringe, while making others giddy: A punk band, trapped in a club in the middle of nowhere, have to fight off a bunch of murderous skinheads to get…
The second season of Amazon’s Catastrophe might do for the #TGIF-style family sitcom of the late ‘80s and ‘90s what the first did for the ailing rom-com: open-mouthed resuscitation on the operating table after one too many Garry Marshall–fueled heart attacks like Valentine’s Day. (Or New Year’s Eve? It doesn’t…
In ’81 he accessorized his trench coat with high heels and bikini briefs. In ’84 that coat got dandified, high-collared and famously purple, Edwardian formalwear over a frilled tuxedo shirt over that wicked slick of chest hair. It was the get-up of a perv or a president, a look that…
Jonathan Pine, the hero of The Night Manager, might have a syrupy voice and skin tanned to a glowing bronze, but in other respects he’s a classic John le Carré creation. Pine (Tom Hiddleston) makes his living unshowily and in the dark, at a swank hotel, juggling front-desk phone calls,…
Elvis Presley once watched Dr. Strangelove three times in one night at a Memphis movie theater. After that, he made them play the last reel several more times, marveling at it. It’s fascinating to wonder about: Here’s this country’s biggest musical star, the leading man in movies he knew were…
Don’t hold it against Tom Tykwer’s A Hologram for the King that its best scene is also its first. As Alan Clay (Tom Hanks) strides down a suburban street singing a modified version of Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” (“You may find yourself … without a beautiful house ……
Each act in Mountains May Depart, Zhangke Jia’s latest disquisition on China in the 21st Century, takes place in a different time period with a steadily escalating aspect ratio: 1999 in 1.33:1, 2014 in 1.85:1, and 2025 in 2.35:1. As time moves forward, the possibilities expand in kind, with the…
Careful what you wish for. When it was announced that Jessica Chastain and Emily Blunt would be joining Charlize Theron and Chris Hemsworth for the followup to 2012’s humdrum action/fairy tale Snow White and the Huntsman, many filmgoers, myself included, got unduly excited. The original film, while a hit, had…
Julie Delpy’s Lolo is a maternal horror film in the guise of a light romantic comedy, and therein lies much of its charm. Delpy plays Violette, a fortysomething single mother who has long soured on dating when, during a getaway in Biarritz, she meets Jean-René (Dany Boon), a loyal, bumbling…
