With a Stellar Lead, Before I Fall Breaks the Life-on-a-Loop Template

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…

Grim and Bloody, Logan Gets Wolverine Right

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 True Story of Love, Race and Royalty Gets Crammed Into A United Kingdom

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…

In Praise of The Great Wall and Its Gorgeous, Meaningless Spectacle

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…

Fist Fight Purports to Be Transgressive Comedy but Pulls Its Punches

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,…

The Good Fight: Christine Baranski Battles on in a Timely Spinoff

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…

Netflix’s Santa Clarita Diet Offers a Twisted Look at Codependence

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,…

James Baldwin Speaks to Now in I Am Not Your Negro

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…

Apocalypse Today: Mad Max Matters More Now Than Ever

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…

They Can’t Even Make the Sex Hot: On Fifty Shades Darker

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…