How could this not work? Table 19 boasts the right premise and a top-shelf cast: Anna Kendrick, Stephen Merchant, June Squibb, Craig Robinson and the great Lisa Kudrow as the randos consigned to a wedding reception’s least choice table, the one way in the back by the bathrooms. Mostly strangers…
There’s a reason Zoey Deutch is often “the girl” in comedies. Her face expresses multitudes, and the funny guys need a woman with priceless reactions to sell their punch lines. She’s endured dick jokes for Robert De Niro and Zac Efron in Dirty Grandpa, played oblivious straight woman to the…
Logan is a punch in the gut in all the right ways. Onscreen, the X-Men series has always found ways to morph and expand, from time-traveling fantasy to social allegory to political thriller. And it’s done so as other comic-book franchises have ossified, with the DC movies (foolishly) doubling down…
“A cat meowing at your feet, looking up at you, is life smiling at you,” says one of the interviewees in Kedi, and who am I to argue? Ceyda Torun’s daydream-like documentary explores a subject near and dear to my heart: the street cats of Istanbul, those countless, fearless denizens…
A stylized painting of Woody Allen, a golden gun to his forehead, stares down at Hannah Horvath (Lena Dunham) in the astonishing third episode of Girls’ final season. She’s seated in the study of a best-selling wunderkind novelist, planted in the middle of his sofa while he faces her, coldly,…
Director George Mendeluk has stated that he wanted to make Bitter Harvest to bring wider attention to the Holodomor, the forced famine imposed by Joseph Stalin that killed between three and seven million ethnic Ukrainians in the early 1930s. That’s certainly a subject worthy of a film, but the question…
If you’ve grown weary of the Don Drapers and Walter Whites of the world, don’t expect James Keziah Delaney to make a strong first impression. Taboo’s antihero, played with signature laconicism by Tom Hardy, is another difficult man for this golden age of TV — and, as fate would have…
No, I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore is not a documentary about all the things going through your head right now, but in his directing debut, actor Macon Blair (Blue Ruin, Green Room) certainly captures something of the spirit of the times. As this stylized, deliriously violent,…
Jordan Peele’s Get Out is the most trenchant studio release in years, a slow-building, often hilarious horror thriller built upon a dead-serious idea: that a black man walking alone through white suburbs is in as much danger as any slasher-flick teenager. Peele opens with that image, showing us, in a…
In director Amma Asante’s epic political romance A United Kingdom, David Oyelowo and Rosamund Pike star as Seretse and Ruth Khama, the interracial royal couple who stunned the world when they fought to rule the country that would become the Republic of Botswana. The story’s a wildly interesting history lesson…
Maybe this’ll teach us not to judge a movie by its marketing campaign. Thanks to posters and trailers focused solely on its American star, Matt Damon, Zhang Yimou’s The Great Wall has been pilloried as an example of a Chinese myth being given the Hollywood white-savior treatment. In fact, the…
It was interesting, and more than a little inspiring, to watch the public outcry against the nomination of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education over the past couple of weeks — especially the online campaign in which, in response to DeVos’ ill-informed attacks on America’s supposedly failing public education system,…
Television’s smartest network drama went out last year with a slap. The Good Wife, the hour-long CBS procedural about savvy lawyers and sexy investigators, looked as if it was going to end where it began, with Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) standing by her politician husband Peter (Chris Noth) at a…
Even zombies need sensible snacks. In Sheila Hammond’s case, that means a baggie of severed fingers, which she munches like baby carrots while stalking her next victim in a parking garage, her pink “kill poncho” pulled tightly around her shoulders. In Santa Clarita Diet, the new 10-episode Netflix original series,…
Romantic comedies seem to have soured more than most movie genres. It could be due to their insistence on happy endings, or perhaps it’s the rigid structure that demands easily avoidable conflict followed by the protagonist breathlessly chasing down his or her true love just in time for the end…
In 1902, Dr. John Kellogg changed two letters in the word “sanatorium” — defined as a resting spot for disabled soldiers — and changed the world. “Sanitariums” became the health resort of choice for the wealthy and weary, instilling in the privileged a sense that they were perpetually ill, and…
James Baldwin passed away in 1987. Well, that’s partially true. He indeed succumbed to stomach cancer at age 63, but most of his life essence remained, via his books and essays deconstructing American culture. Filmmaker Raoul Peck (Lumumba, Sometimes in April) has been a Baldwin devotee since reading The Fire…
Like Ava DuVernay’s 13th, Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro travels a straight, well-researched path from the darkest tragedies of American history to the ones that plague the country today. Both films filter African-American life through the prism of the societal construct called race, but while DuVernay’s dissertation focuses…
George Miller’s sci-fi series began in 1979 with the low-budget, practically DIY gearhead grindhouse flick Mad Max, and it was revived in 2015 with the delirious action masterpiece Mad Max: Fury Road. All along the way, these pictures have captured something about their times that has allowed them to break…
Legion, the much-anticipated new FX series created by Fargo showrunner Noah Hawley, wastes no time plunging us into the murky depths of its lead’s unraveling mind, from blissful youth to harrowing adulthood plagued by a failed suicide attempt. Every scene is a dense visual and sonic cornucopia. Even quiet moments…
Boundaries are violated repeatedly in Fifty Shades Darker, a film that demands even more submission of its audience than its predecessor, 2015’s Fifty Shades of Grey. No safeword can protect you from the sequel’s depleting incoherence, its punishing pileup of plot and its inability to successfully stage, even once, the…
First, the good news: The dog doesn’t die in John Wick: Chapter 2. This will come as a relief to some of us who adored the original, an action masterpiece about a retired hitman taking unholy revenge on the Russian scumbags who killed his pup and stole his car. The…
