Film, TV & Streaming

“Imagine if marriage didn’t exist, and you’re a guy and you ask someone to get married,” proposes comedian Aziz Ansari in his new Netflix stand-up special, Buried Alive, which premieres November 1. “Hey, so we’ve been hanging out all the time, spending a lot of time together. I want to…

The Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival — or FLIFF, as it is endearingly known — returns for its 28th incarnation on October 18 and runs through November 11. FLIFF is already recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest film fest in the world, and this year,…

Being a sensible person, you’ve probably taken a liking to Benedict Cumberbatch — the actor, Dickensian beanpole, and banana-fana name-game destroyer who has lately played everyone literate geeks adore: Sherlock, Smaug, Kahn. And, as a sensible person, you probably were curious — even heartened — to hear Cumberbatch would appear…

Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave is the movie for people who think they’re too smart for The Butler. The story it tells, a true one, is horrifying: In 1841, Solomon Northup, a free, educated black man from Saratoga, New York, was kidnaped, sold into slavery, and transported to Louisiana…

Kimberly Peirce changes almost nothing in her rallying remake of Brian De Palma’s classic about a troubled telekinetic teenager. She doesn’t have to. Yes, now the mean girls who pelt Carrie with tampons upload a cell phone video of the attack, and the well-meaning jock who squires the school outcast…

What’s illegal at Disneyland? Dogs, drugs, alcohol, pamphlets, flags and large coolers. Not listed? Secretly shooting a feature-length movie. But Disneyland couldn’t have imagined director Randy Moore would have the courage to film Escape From Tomorrow on location — and that it would be so horny. In the black-and-white theme…

There are definitely some geeks out there who are worried about Zero Charisma. Does the movie take a lot of cheap shots, or does it for once accurately show what it’s like to be a geek? Zero Charisma is more of a nuanced character study than a broad comedy, and…

Tom Hanks has built a career out of playing aggressively noble roles, so it’s only natural to want to see him taken down a peg. But it’s no fun to watch him suffer at the hands of Somali pirates in Paul Greengrass’s true-life adventure Captain Phillips. Hanks plays the commander…

During his 2012 presidential campaign, Republican candidate Herman Cain rhapsodized about the fence he’d build on the U.S.-Mexico border: 20 feet tall with barbed wire, electricity, and a moat. “And I would put those alligators in that moat!” he cheered. For Machete Kills, Robert Rodriguez built that fence but left…

Like all kid protagonists in movies, Wadjda’s Wadjda wants one pure thing so much that the very concept of want shades into need. If this plucky Saudi Arabian girl (played by preteen Waad Mohammed) doesn’t get a bicycle, it seems, some fundamental quality of hers might not survive her adolescence…

Something’s seemed different about No. 1 American action hero Bruce Willis lately. His action movie output in recent years has mostly been stunt casting in mediocre sequels (The Expendables 2, G.I. Joe: Retaliation), or supporting roles in little-seen B-movies (Setup, Catch .44, Fire with Fire), as if he’s in a…

I’m pretty sure the dumbest way to die is killing yourself upon discovering that faking your own death has tricked your forbidden lover into his or her own suicide. The second might be to get gutted in one of the jumbled, perfunctory sword fights that clang up the streets of…

Perhaps the best and worst thing about young teenagers is that they’re capable of what George W. Bush fans used to call “great moral clarity.” In HBO’s sure-to-make-you-bawl documentary Valentine Road, Aliyah, a student at E.O. Green Junior High School in Oxnard, California, breaks down the differences between gayness and…

“What a shitty place to die.” Whatever your feelings about Dallas, that’s a pretty harsh assessment. Then again, the character in Peter Landesman’s well-intentioned but unfulfilling Parkland who says it, an aide to fallen President John F. Kennedy, can probably be forgiven for his snotty Yankee attitude. Next month marks…

Some movies are so tense and deeply affecting that they shave years off your life as you’re watching, only to give back that lost time, and more, at the end. Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity is one of those movies. Sandra Bullock and George Clooney play astronauts — one a medical engineer,…

The Great Santini with a pinch of Straw Dogs in French wine country, Gilles Legrand’s You Will Be My Son recalls the “A” pictures Hollywood has basically stopped making. Whether Legrand’s alternately compelling and clichéd drama of father-son struggles achieves the greatness of the aforementioned films is another matter. Paul…

For anyone itching to see Stephen Dorff portray an Israeli POW, your opportunity has finally arrived. Zaytoun follows Dorff’s Yoni, an Israeli pilot imprisoned by the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1982 Beirut. In captivity, he befriends Fahed (Abdallah El Akal), a fast-talking 12-year-old refugee and one of the PLO’s newly…

In their experimental new film, Metallica endeavor to translate the anger and pain in their music into a visual medium. Directed by Nimród Antalis, Metallica Through the Neveris the band’s second big-screen effort, the first being being the 2004 behind-the-scenes documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster. That debut, created by…