Back in 2013, James Wan’s The Conjuring represented the high point of a wave of mainstream horror that showed there was still value in old-school scares — that there was life beyond torture porn and slick slasher reboots. It was a ghost story-turned-possession thriller that mined terror out of the…
In 2001 a friend, a grown-up, saw The Fellowship of the Ring more than a dozen time in the theater. Sometimes she’d leave with a half hour left. “I just needed to get to Galadriel and Lothlorien,” she told me. She didn’t need all the climactic fighting. In 2012 I…
There’s something satisfying about hearing Tyler Perry, as mad scientist Baxter Stockman, say the words “Eliminate those turtles,” but it’s not quite novel enough to bring Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows up to street level and out of the sewers. Early on, giant squid-like brain Krang (Brad…
If mid-century pulp and noir gave us the cynical, quippy hardboiled detective, then Peak TV has given birth to its successor: the charbroiled cop, a bitter, corrupt, philandering, violent, addicted, nihilistic or just psychotic contemporary crime fighter. The supposed irony of this figure is that he (almost always a he)…
“Did I want to shoot comedies?” asks Brandon Trost, director of photography on two of this summer’s funniest films, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping and Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising. “It’s funny — not at all.” But then came MacGruber, Jorma Taccone’s 2010 SNL film.“The director wanted me because I wasn’t…
It’s a feat to out-idiot TMZ culture. In achieving that, the fake-doc white-rapper satire Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is a breakthrough for studio comedies, which here at last catch up to the metabolism and meaninglessness of the internet age. In its generous, frenetic first hour, Popstar’s jokes and parodies…
Fairy tales were meant to be oral stories. Translating the tangents of old women in far-flung villages (whose chips on their shoulders about, say, their brother’s failed shipping business might inspire long asides about the shipping industry) into written texts doesn’t always make for the most linear, easy read. In…
Not much has been heard from Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan since it won the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, beating out pictures like Todd Haynes’ Carol, László Nemes’ Son of Saul and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin. But going into this understated film cold isn’t a bad way to…
In 2013, a 22-year-old Palestinian named Mohammed Assaf won the second edition of the Middle Eastern singing competition Arab Idol, a spinoff of the same popular British Pop Idol franchise that also gave us American Idol. Mohammed had snuck out of Gaza and crashed the auditions in Egypt before making…
There was a time when the summer movie season was a season, sandwiched between Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends. By the 21st century, the start date drifted back to the first weekend in May. This year, the superhero flicks started arriving with Deadpool’s release on February 12. Only two…
There’s a scene during the first half of Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Apocalypse that is so emotionally resonant, so well-put-together and so quiet that you might briefly forget you’re watching a superhero film. It involves a raid by some Polish officers in the remote forest where Erik Lehnsherr, aka Magneto (Michael…
Even by the standards of Yorgos Lanthimos, The Lobster’s premise is a doozy: Colin Farrell plays a recently single schlub forced to report to the Hotel, where he has 45 days to form a romantic relationship lest he be turned into an animal of his choosing. This is the plight…
In his archly empathetic comedies, Whit Stillman has long chronicled the uncertain ways in which young people of privilege launch themselves into worlds too in decline to offer them much. The debutante-ball life of Metropolitan or the nightclub and publishing circles of The Last Days of Disco are already dying before…
At long last, Whit Stillman has adapted a Jane Austen book. To be sure, he has touched on her work numerous times — particularly in his 1990 directorial debut Metropolitan, in which an argument about Mansfield Park gave us the immortal line “I don’t read novels. I prefer good literary…
The first time I saw the documentary Weiner, at Missouri’s True/False Festival this past March, Donald Trump was boasting about the size of his cock during a presidential debate. Given the recent direction of our electoral politics, you might think that a film about former New York Representative Anthony Weiner…
The guiding principle of Lewis Carroll’s classics Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass is that logic does not exist. You tumble down rabbit holes and into mirrors willy-nilly, and you try to survive, feeling what you feel, having fun when you can — oh, and try not to drown…
Something troubling is afoot in Westeros: The heroes are beginning to outnumber the villains. The sixth season of Game of Thrones has already seen Jon Snow’s return from the dead, Arya Stark’s vision restored and — courtesy of two Stark children’s long-awaited reunion — the show’s first-ever tears of joy…
Let’s break the bad news this way. Maria Bamford’s new Netflix series isn’t a disaster. It’s sometimes funny — it’s got comic genius Maria Bamford in almost every scene! — but only its finest moments bear the stamp of sensibility. Too often, this fitful, clamorous show feels Bamford-flavored rather than…
If it had come out 20 years ago, when its creator was Hollywood’s best-paid screenwriter, Shane Black’s The Nice Guys might have stood, for some, as more proof that the studios had lost their way. So much money lavished on bloody buddy formula, on two-fisted archetypes cracking a case, some…
In Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising, the sequel to 2014’s old-people-vs.-frat-brothers comedy, Zac Efron takes off his shirt in nearly every scene he’s in. It’s a sight to behold — again and again and again, but a calculated effort, like most of this film, to appeal to the ladies. As surprising…
Stately, earthy, graphic, riveting: Gabriel Mascaro’s Neon Bull is one of those art-house studies that plops the camera down someplace far from us and, in exquisite long takes, examines the lives that almost seem to just be happening there anyway. No matter how rigorously worked out each shot and its…
Never one to betray the courage of his convictions, Luca Guadagnino excels at the unrepentantly grandiose and ludicrous. The title alone of his previous narrative feature, I Am Love (2009), signaled operatic sweep and loony sincerity, qualities further exalted by the film’s visual ravishments and seductive voluptuousness. The Italian director’s…
