“As it always happens in the Chris Guest movies, we really don’t talk to each other before we get to set,” Jane Lynch says, explaining how she creates her menagerie of characters, specifically Gabby Monkhouse from Guest’s newest mockumentary, Mascots. “A couple months before, I got a call from Chris,…
As has been widely noted, Woody Allen’s Crisis in Six Scenes isn’t really a television series; its six episodes are not particularly self-contained, and plot developments crest and climax willy-nilly regardless of where each segment ends. It’s a two-and-a-half-hour movie, the longest one Allen’s ever made, and with the option…
Fred Armisen and Bill Hader are a rarity in the comedy world: funny people with hearts of gold. It was obvious all those years when they were cast members on Saturday Night Live. They handled their characters — whether living, dead or purely fictional — with a visible sweetness. Think…
Voyage of Time: The IMAX Experience might be the most narrative film of Terrence Malick’s career. The enigmatic director’s recent work has been marked by a turn toward elliptical, stream-of-consciousness meditations, pretty much discarding any semblance of conventional storytelling. But going as far back as Badlands (1973), he’s had a…
It takes all of two minutes of listening to Emily Blunt’s voiceover in The Girl on the Train before you have to wonder whether this narrator might be unreliable. As her Rachel rides Metro-North in and out of Manhattan, detailing her growing obsession with the ostensibly perfect couple she steals…
Forgiveness is tricky and personal, and you can’t be blamed for not offering it. Buying a ticket to Nate Parker’s slave-revolt drama The Birth of a Nation demands at least some measure of it. As you’ve probably heard, while a student at Penn State, Parker — the film’s star, director…
South Florida has no shortage of film festivals: Borscht, Filmgate, Brazilian, Key West, American Black, Miami Jewish, Miami Short, Popcorn Frights, and others. But the most prestigious of them all are the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival and the Miami Film Festival, which together bring hundreds of new films to…
When Relativity Media — the production company/distributor behind Masterminds, the newest vehicle for Zach Galifianakis to do his painfully committed schtick — started getting press, co-founder/co-CEO Ryan Kavanaugh boasted of his secret sauce for success. A proprietary risk-evaluation algorithm that crunched variables like cast, release date, relative examples in the…
In the nine years since she was first accused of and jailed for murder — then exculpated, only to be retried and found guilty again, and finally absolved — Amanda Knox has learned a thing or two about performance. “Either I’m a psychopath in sheep’s clothing…,” the 21st century’s most…
Judy Davis doesn’t like the expression “scene-stealing,” even though it precisely describes her performance in The Dressmaker. “I always sort of cringe when I hear that,” she says, “because what it implies is that’s what the actor is after.” So let’s just put it this way: As Kate Winslet’s acerbic,…
Christian Carion’s refugees-on-the-march World War II drama Come What May is the kind of old-fashioned war movie that’s crafted not just to emphasize history’s horror and brutality. Yes, Carion stages the occasional slaughter with heartsick brio, and sometimes can’t resist taking pleasure when the violence goes against the bad guys,…
A woman wears sunglasses, a tight red dress, matching long gloves and red lipstick. She stands and smokes a cigarette, ostensibly watching a rugby game, but really the players are watching her, fumbling their footwork, and it’s exactly the effect she desires. This early scene, with its shifting gazes and…
The conventional wisdom about early-career Tim Burton is that he was an imaginative visual stylist but not a great storyteller. That sounds smart, right? It’s still something that a certain kind of ratty-beard-stroking film critic keeps tucked in his sweater vest in case he needs to say something that sounds…
Deepwater Horizon is the most entertaining Hollywood disaster movie in years. I’m sorry — is that a terrible thing to say? Peter Berg’s film is based on the true story of the BP-leased, Transocean-owned deepwater drilling rig that in 2010 exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 souls and…
Mira Nair’s Queen of Katwe is a true-life tale transformed into an inspirational fable. That’s not novel for the movies, but in this director’s hands, the results are mostly enchanting. The film follows Phiona Mutesi (Madina Nalwanga), an impoverished Ugandan girl who became a chess champion at the age of…
The first moments of Luke Cage offer much that the previous 38 or so hours of Marvel superhero Netflix drama haven’t: laughter. Warmth. A sense that the New York City that Daredevil and Jessica Jones mope and brawl through might be more than just a place to save — it…
One of the benefits of services like Netflix and Amazon Prime is that they allow TV stars, liberated from the confines of network television and cable, to try something new, expand their reach or otherwise kick it up a notch. In Amazon’s Eat the World, for example, Emeril Lagasse, the…
America might not be ready for Fleabag, the new Amazon/BBC series from British writer and creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Think about all the guff Girls received for “forcing” viewers along on a ride with myopic 20-somethings. Waller-Bridge has gone even further than Girls creator Lena Dunham, speaking directly to the camera…
In this age of billion-dollar, candy-colored, fully digital child-distraction movie-making, the new chatty-animal adventure comedy Storks wouldn’t have to be good in any way to be wildly profitable. It often is good, though, hilariously so, its too-familiar misfits-become-a-family storyline enlivened by flights of lavish comic invention. Its set pieces, especially…
Still and silent, Jerry Lewis slumps there like old furniture in the lifeless house in which the first half of Daniel Noah’s coming-of-old-age drama Max Rose molders. The film is a fiction, a tidy and improbable one, but these scenes have documentary power. Lewis’ Max Rose, recently bereaved, sits and…
Look, if you’re not stirred by the sight of Denzel Washington, clad in head-to-toe black, riding a black stallion over dunes and bluffs and right up to the saloon of some two-bit frontier town — well, then maybe the movies just aren’t for you. Washington, of course, strides right into…
Over the last 10 days, the Toronto International Film Festival has screened hundreds of movies from all across the world. LA Weekly’s April Wolfe and Michael Nordine trekked to Canada in search of the best of the fest, from the Cannes holdovers and awards hopefuls to the world premieres and…
