Through the ornate fonts, tints, intertitles, scores, acting techniques, and camera tricks that have made his “directed by” credit the ultimate redundancy, Guy Maddin demonstrates in The Forbidden Room that he has forgotten more about silent movies and early talkies than almost anyone else will ever know. And it’s the…
In a 2001 interview, producer Lee Mendelson recalled the reaction of a CBS executive who attended a screening of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” shortly before it was scheduled to premiere, on December 9, 1965: “Well, it’s in the TV Guide logs — we gotta put it on the air. Nice…
Bryan Cranston parades through Trumbo, a wiki-pageant of shorthand history, like he’s a costumed kid playing Actor Bryan Cranston at a Disney park. As blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, a man given to mannered diction, Cranston layers movieland falseness over the scraped-raw heart of his Breaking Bad triumph. Remember how you…
Maybe Cars and the Hot Wheels-ification of Pixar has been a good thing. Now that the storied studio has, like its rivals, puked onto our screens indifferent kid-distracting junk, its new movies come unfreighted from expectations of genius. Miserable as it was, Planes: Fire and Rescue (from corporate parent Disney…
The heads of the City Dionysia, the Grecian playwriting competition that pitted Aeschylus against Sophocles and can be considered the original Oscars, had a rule: no original characters. Instead, the best creative minds of a generation — or really, a millennium — exhausted themselves finding new spins on, say, Medea…
Bees are such tiny, seemingly inconsequential creatures, yet milligram for milligram, they affect the landscape in profound ways. You could say the same about small, delicate movies like Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher’s 2014 Cannes Grand Prix winner The Wonders, which tells the story of a hippie beekeeper family in the…
Saoirse Ronan makes a grand case for herself as the millennial generation’s finest leading lady in Brooklyn, an immaculately crafted, immensely moving character study about a 1950s immigrant struggling to find her place in the world. With an open, innocent countenance equally capable of registering tremulous separation anxiety, exhilarating joy,…
The Nazis lost World War II, but they’ve conquered the American imagination. Seventy years after his suicide, Hitler is still everywhere: in the movies, on YouTube, in political headlines and on the History Channel. The latest manifestation of our Third Reich fixation is The Man in the High Castle, Amazon’s…
With the spectacular The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2, the best in the series, Jennifer Lawrence closes out the franchise that made her the biggest star of her generation. Since The Hunger Games began in 2012, she’s starred in four of them and only six of everything else. Luckily,…
Comedian Gregg Turkington sits at an airport bar in Van Nuys, orders a spiced whiskey sour — the joint’s too-sweet specialty cocktail — and stares out the window at the tiny commuter jets he hates. “I’m terrified of flying, like seriously freaked out,” he says. “But I fly more than…
Like grad school or that cave in The Empire Strikes Back, what you get out of Rick Alverson’s bold and desolate Entertainment depends on what you put into it. It’s less a film you watch than a breakdown episode you try to get through, a bottomed-out desert lulu that manages…
It’s clear why Angelina Jolie Pitt became a star. She was a sexpot with talent, and, just as crucially, her feline beauty was a sexpot breed we’d never seen. Past glamazons like Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardner, and Jayne Mansfield trailed a whiff of insecurity. We could sense that they were…
Marvel’s Jessica Jones is smart, surprising and occasionally terrifying, a human tale of trauma and healing in a superhero vein. Its first episodes have more (unexploitative) sex scenes than battles, more shrugs and eye rolls than mighty kapows. But it’s not the shock or novelty that gives it resonance. Jessica…
We’ve gotten used to the idea that the highest-quality, most innovative television lives on premium cable channels like HBO and Showtime. But two of the most delightful and inventive series to premiere in the past year have come from an unexpected place: the CW. Jane the Virgin and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend…
First things first: Yes, Gaspar Noé’s arthouse sexbomb, Love, quite literally goes off in your face, with an ejaculation closeup 90 minutes in that might have you wiping off your 3D glasses. You might think that’s an impressive provocation, until you recall that every 12-year-old boy in America sees that…
Completing a trifecta of recent cinema (after Masters of Sex and The Stanford Prison Experiment) suddenly fascinated with the social-science lab experiments of the Eisenhower-Nixon era, Experimenter is as cool as a grad student clamping electrodes onto a test monkey. One of our lowest-profile indie-film treasures, director Michael Almereyda never…
How do you dramatize the unthinkable? On August 5, 2010, 33 Chilean miners were trapped when the 100-year-old gold and copper mine in which they were working collapsed around them. For weeks, no one knew if they were alive or dead. But 69 days later, after a team of international…
In its very first scene, Aziz Ansari’s new Netflix series, Master of None, presents something never before seen on TV: an Asian-American male romantic lead at the center of his own series. Granted, that scene is hardly sexy: A broken condom puts the brakes on a bar hook-up between Dev…
The Muppets doesn’t work, exactly, but I’m still watching. As a relative outsider to the 60-year Muppets franchise, I’ve long suspected that early imprinting is the key to loving Jim Henson’s gaudy, unblinking rags. I’ve never felt a particular need to watch pieces of felt tell Borscht Belt–style jokes, and…
Because women are particularly beguiling when viewed from behind, the camera loves to follow them: Anyone who’s watched James Stewart’s lovesick detective trailing Kim Novak, a platinum dream poured into a pale-gray flannel hourglass, understands the voyeurism at the heart of Vertigo. With Spectre — the 24th James Bond picture…
For the past three decades, the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival has been the unofficial kickoff of Broward County’s cultural season, and this month’s landmark 30th anniversary festival is no exception. More than 150 features, documentaries, and shorts from around the block (like Stories on the Skin, a doc about…
Political drama has long been shaped by what we can call the conversion narrative. In a play such as 1938’s One Third of a Nation, an everyman Joe you just gotta root for tries to live life honestly, outside of politics, only to find such living impossible: The system is…
