In Defense of Furious 7

Furious 7 and While We’re Young are two very different movies — one’s all synchronized driving and explosions, the other’s all sorta-depressed New Yorkers who don’t drive — but both receive generally positive reviews from Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice, and Amy Nicholson of LA Weekly,…

Mad Men: What’s Left After Achieving Everything?

Mad Men has always been, among many other things, about the exit of the old guard and the entrance of the new — and the acceleration of that transition by the mood and the movements of the Sixties. The pilot, set in 1960, finds the Sterling Cooper higher-ups scrambling to…

In Danny Collins, Al Pacino Stares Down His Stardom

Some years ago, I went to see Tom Jones perform. He sang all the hits, but I was unnerved by his new, walnut-brown goatee. It looked freshly trimmed and fake, like he’d ripped it off Evil Spock backstage. Superstars aren’t allowed to change. Even the fans who love them insist…

Effie Gray Vaguely Damns Ruskin as a Prude

In 1848, Euphemia Gray, a bright and pretty young girl from a family of modest means, left her home in Scotland to marry her era’s equivalent of an art-world rock star, the imposingly erudite critic John Ruskin. Perhaps as early as her wedding night, Effie knew she had made a…

Ballet 422 Is a Stirring Portrait of Deep Focus in Creative Work

It seems as if, for every ten issue-oriented documentaries that essentially function as long-form magazine articles with images attached, we get perhaps one doc that exemplifies the methods of “direct cinema” — the observational mode of documentary filmmaking that allows audiences to observe from a detached remove. That mode is…

Insurgent Might Be a Synonym for ‘Brain-Dead’

We’re two films in to the kiddie-dystopia Divergent franchise, and it’s still unclear if the sequel’s director, three screenwriters, eight producers, and especially original novelist Veronica Roth have bothered to double-check a dictionary. Divergent, and now this new sequel Insurgent, tracks the monotone mishaps of Tris (Shailene Woodley), a very…

In the Sprightly Doc An Honest Liar, the Amazing Randi Debunks Again

“The public really doesn’t listen when they’re being told straightforward facts,” says the Amazing Randi. The magician, escape artist, and tiny lion of principled skepticism, now north of 80, leans forward in a black chair, all knees and elbows and Old Testament beard. If it weren’t for that sharpie’s suit…

Bravura Anthology Wild Tales Lays Bare Everyone’s Awfulness

There are two kinds of humanist movie. One kind shows human beings struggling against the most unspeakable horrors, sorrows, or injustices and still somehow emerging with their essential goodness intact. The second, thornier type gives us people doing terrible things to one another — screaming, cheating, and generally making life…

Disney’s New Cinderella Is Sumptuous and Fearless

There’s no empowerment message embedded in Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella, no “Girls can do anything!” cheerleader vibe. That’s why it’s wonderful. This is a straight, no-chaser fairy story, a picture to be downed with pleasure. It worries little about sending the wrong message and instead trusts us to decode its politics,…

Mike Tyson, History Buff

“Mark Twain said boxing is the only sport where a slave, if he’s successful, can rub shoulders with royalty,” says former heavyweight Mike Tyson, who once knocked out nineteen opponents in a row. “Can you imagine that? Just by fighting another human being, he can meet a king, a prince,…

Sean Penn Is Mighty in the Strained Gunman

In the action thriller The Gunman, Sean Penn, at age 54, looks neither old nor young. He’s been in training to look this age for a long time. Even as a relative kid, in 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High, his sailor-on-shore-leave mug had a wry, quizzical roughness to it; it was…

Merchants of Doubt Reveals a Country Eager to Be Fooled

The Amazing Randi insists that the public wants to be fooled, that it’s easier and more comforting for us not to see unromantic truths — you can see him proclaiming this, a little sadly, in Justin Weinstein and Tyler Measom’s doc An Honest Liar, which plays like a companion piece…

Hard Living Can’t Diminish the Radiant Shine of Girlhood

Céline Sciamma’s pained, thrilling, observational tale of growing up broke and black in slab-like Paris flats is no rebuke to Boyhood, but its besties-dancing-to-Rihanna rhapsody eats the lunch of that bit where Richard Linklater has Ethan Hawke drone on about Wings. They sing, “We’re beautiful like diamonds in the sky!”…

The Miami International Film Festival Embraces Miami-Bred Filmmakers

From Sundance to Toronto to South by Southwest, Miami filmmakers have made their mark on the festival circuit. The city’s most buzzed-about collective, Borscht Corp., has had work accepted at major gatherings around the world — but never at the Miami International Film Festival (MIFF). Until now. MIFF, which returns…