Yes, it’s 3-D computer animation, and yes, it shows us more of the face of Charlie Brown’s Little Red-Haired Girl than you ever thought you would see. But the news, for the most part, is good: The Peanuts Movie is much closer in spirit to Charles Schulz’s half-century comic-strip masterpiece…
Toni Collette rages through Catherine Hardwicke’s cancer weepie Miss You Already like a fire in a chain restaurant. The film around her is good, welcoming fare, the kind that snobs always underestimate. But then Collette, playing a vain patient bereft at losing her hair and her ability to wear seven-inch…
Before Anthony Bourdain published Kitchen Confidential in 2000, mere mortals who simply eat in restaurants had little idea about the drinking, debauchery, and drug use rampant among the folks responsible for getting their fettuccine alfredo to the table. The book was eye-opening if true and a rambunctious, vicarious pleasure even…
David Gordon Green’s Our Brand Is Crisis is a horror film wrapped in fast-talking political comedy. Watching Sandra Bullock, as ruthless campaign manager Jane, flog her uncharismatic candidate for Bolivia’s next president, I snickered at her knowing quips. Asked by an offscreen TV interviewer (the film’s awkward framing device) to…
The most effective scene in James Vanderbilt’s brisk, outraged Truth is one that will be familiar to anyone who has ever sat in a room where editors and reporters are breaking down an investigative story. The reporters — here, 60 Minutes researchers played by Dennis Quaid, Elisabeth Moss, and Topher…
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin is the Taiwanese director’s first foray into the martial-arts genre. It may also be his most resplendent film yet: Watching it is like floating along on a sumptuous gold-and-lacquer cloud. Hou favorite Shu Qi (who also starred in Millennium Mambo and Three Times) plays Nie Yinniang,…
This Jem is less a movie than an open-source brand launch: If you’re young and down or bullied or disconnected from the life around you, you could always slap on some glitter and film yourself singing as the cartoon-rock queen Jem. Aubrey Peeples, playing the singer, even gets a sort…
Sure, you can blame the aliens, the gophers, the monkeys and the fridge. But even without all those, 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Harrumphing of the Whatsit likely wouldn’t have worked. Its director, you see, no longer finds it edifying to dream up new ways to kill America’s historical enemies…
In his 2014 book Difficult Men, journalist Brett Martin identifies bad-boy antiheroes as the defining feature of our current “Golden Age” of television. Tony Soprano, Don Draper and The Wire’s Omar Little dazzle with their multifaceted complexity: How deep the furrow in Tony’s troubled brow! How pensive the trail of…
Critics lampoon him as a fast/furious lug nut, a hunk of well-oiled meat who doesn’t so much act as ka-thunk his face and body through its limited gears. To hell with them. Vin Diesel may not run smoothly, but he runs with purpose and conviction, and any line of dialogue…
Quick! Name the movie in which Bill Murray plays a proudly shabby dude who acts like a prick for an hour and then, for reasons of narrative convention rather than character-based truth, shambles toward either heroism or some vague be-nicer enlightenment. Maybe a tougher challenge would be to name the…
Here’s a hair-raising assignment: Imagine you’re tasked with capturing the social and psychological complexities of a nation’s crackup within the framework of popular moviemaking. What if Gone With the Wind had tried, in its swooning romance, to explicate Scarlett O’Hara’s slow-to-dawn realization of the hopeless immorality of the world she…
The minds of math and science geniuses have long fascinated the makers of crowd-pleasing narrative features, which is curious, as the complexities that fascinate those minds are antithetical to the feelings-first bounce of popular filmmaking. The movies, having settled into candied naturalism, already struggle to suggest interiority, even of characters…
Twenty-year-old Josh’s (Josh Thomas) world explodes twice in the Please Like Me pilot: first when he realizes he’s gay and again when his bipolar mother, Rose (Debra Lawrance), attempts suicide. Josh takes both revelations in stride, though he dreads having to inform his mom, whom he’ll be living with and…
Mia Wasikowska is proof of reincarnation. The Australian actress must be possessed by the spirit of Lillian Gish. At 22 — the same age that Gish starred in Birth of a Nation — Wasikowska became a bankable name playing the lead in Tim Burton’s garish Alice in Wonderland. In the…
Aaron Sorkin opens a new desktop icon with Steve Jobs, a briskly busy, talkative companion piece to the Newsroom and Moneyball writer’s Mark Zuckerberg-centric The Social Network. Adapting Walter Isaacson’s biography of the Apple innovator — and covering much of the same ground as Alex Gibney’s documentary Steve Jobs: The…
Steven Spielberg’s true-story Cold War procedural Bridge of Spies has a wintry chill. The colors are gray and green, the skin tones pale as frozen fish, and the film stock fuzzed and snowy. Our protagonist, James Donovan (Tom Hanks), spends half the movie waylaid by a cold and takes his…
Jafar Panahi looks happier than he has in a while — and he’s getting out. That’s encouraging, and it doesn’t mean that his latest act of defiance, the film Taxi, isn’t bold. Once again creating cinema in spite of Iran’s 20-year edict forbidding him to do so, this most daring…
Here’s a scary story for you. Somewhere in Hollywood, a cabal of producers are forever zombie-ing up the corpses of long-dead licensed properties, ever hopeful that you will continue to throw your money at familiar trademarked characters even as they eat your brains. Sometimes, when a silver moon shines just…
Acronyms, who doesn’t love them? And this year there’s a new one to learn as the Miami LGBT Film festival officially merges its name with the Fort Lauderdale edition to become MiFo – the Miami-Fort Lauderdale LGBT Film Festival. Formerly the Fort Lauderdale Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, MiFo has…
A documentary about a magazine is doomed never to capture the thing it’s documenting. The best that can be said for Douglas Tirola’s Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead is that it captures, at times, the heady disbelief of paging through its subject, the National Lampoon, the headwaters of much of American…
Right up into the 1960s, the Hays Code demanded that criminals in American movies face punishment by the final reel, a stricture that, however well-intentioned, served to propagate our national myth: that the only route to success is hard work and decency. Crime still doesn’t pay, exactly, onscreen — the…
