It’s an ironic truth that directors fascinated by robots tend to make inhuman movies. From Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner to last year’s Transcendence, these stories that ponder the gap between man and machine often reveal filmmakers unsure of where they fit in — they get so involved in the question…
Margot Wins the Willennium If Grace Kelly had been raised by coyotes, she might have stalked the screen like Focus’ Margot Robbie, a va-va-voom blonde with bite. Robbie is too beautiful to play normal, too sly to play nice. Miscast as a shy saint in Craig Zobel’s upcoming Sundance hit…
Even if you’ve never seen or heard of a movie called She Killed in Ecstasy, isn’t it lovely to know that such a thing exists in the world? That 1971 eroto-thriller was a creation of prolific Spanish-born writer/director Jess Franco, who had a lasting career making florid B movies with…
Spike Lee still summons miracles — but sometimes you gotta dig for them. I can’t exactly recommend Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, his remake/cover/jazz-variation on Bill Gunn’s epochal indie lulu Ganja and Hess, but I can recommend Ganja and Hess, so elusive and bloody and challenging a picture that it’s…
Where we come from defines us more than we even realize. That’s the idea implicit in Andrey Zvyagintsev’s somber, sturdily elegant drama Leviathan, in which a mechanic who has lived on the same parcel of land all his life — as his father and grandfather did before him — resists…
TV shows aren’t too different from people in at least one respect: The longer they’ve been around, the less interest they tend to garner. But the sixth season of FX’s beloved spy spoof Archer is like few others. It’s an “unrebooting” of the previous year, in which creator Adam Reed,…
Shove off, John Hughes. The DUFF, a high-school comedy by Ari Sandel, opens by declaring that The Breakfast Club’s social categories are, like, way passé. Explains lead Bianca (Mae Whitman): “Jocks play videogames, princesses are on antidepressants, and geeks rule the world.” Today, be ye goth kid, science dweeb, or…
American Sniper notwithstanding, the first fresh multiplex trend to emerge in 2015 is Old White Dudes Learning How to Share Their World. First came Kevin Costner in the sour Black or White, playing a coot who discovers that black folks love their kids too, even in South Los Angeles. Who…
Here at last is peak Anna Kendrick: In intimate long takes and in comic montage, she belts, hurts, swoons, and rages, always remaining appealingly human. You can tell, when Kendrick scraps for her big notes, that she’s not a natural, that she’s working hard, that she’s living a dream. All…
Five years ago, four losers passed out in a Jacuzzi, boiled back to 1986, healed their past wounds, rocked out to Poison, and returned to their timeline as gods. Thusly, Hot Tub Time Machine director Steve Pink was hailed as a minor deity: He’d taken a dumber-than-huffing-hairspray premise and made…
Empire most certainly wasn’t built in a day, but its reputation as a breakout hit has been made in virtually no time at all. Since the series debuted six weeks ago, every episode has drawn more viewers than the one before it. Buoyed by positive reviews and especially word of…
Those more devoted to the genre can debate whether Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsman: The Secret Service is the best comic-book movie of the past few years. What’s beyond argument, however, is that Vaughn has whipped up the most interesting one, the only to make ferocious, unsettling art out of the great…
No matter how you end up feeling about it, there sure is a lot of movie in Mommy, Xavier Dolan’s exuberant melodrama about an emotional firecracker of a teenager who, after being kicked out of a specialized school for setting the cafeteria on fire, goes home to live with his…
The thing about hating your job and not giving a shit is that it can happen to anyone, anytime — it might even explain the longueurs late in most two-term presidencies. In Talya Lavie’s bored, biting comedy Zero Motivation, aggrieved ennui hits right in the heart of the Intifada. Not…
Even fans of Fifty Shades of Grey admit the book is a literary atrocity. Novelist E.L. James’ erotic reveries read like the rantings of a drunken yokel — less “His firm hands cupped my breasts” and more “Holy crap! He’s touching my boobs!” The story is simple: 21-year-old virgin Anastasia…
In 2004, I worked at a bar in Kansas City’s River Market district. One night, a woman handed me her credit card to pay her tab; I looked at it and said, “HAHA. Your name is Monica Ross!” She made a big, exasperated noise and dropped her forehead to the…
Ten years ago, Wellington, New Zealand, was less welcoming of vampires. When Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, two unknown comedians, walked the streets in velvet frocks and ruffles for a 2005 sketch, dudes would drive by and scream homophobic slurs. Says Clement, “We were constantly abused.” Over the next decade,…
To the idle viewer, the small acts of resistance on display in Timbuktu might seem ready-made for Upworthy, little liberal lessons just waiting to be parceled out to anyone who “won’t believe what happens next.” Yet that type of self-righteous sentimentality — and its opposing strawman, knee-jerk cynicism — is…
This year, Sundance started a week late to bypass Martin Luther King Day. Perhaps that’s why buyers bid on films like sprinters racing after lost time. Thanks to their spending spree, every movie on this list should eventually make it to a theater near you — or at least to…
(Heavy spoilers for the pilot; very light spoilers for the second and third episodes.) There’s more than one way to start a revolution. You can get high off your own sense of righteousness and authenticity, as celebrity chef and Fresh Off the Boat memoirist Eddie Huang recently did by calling…
“You ready for another miserable video game?” I heard one critic crack to another as I settled in for Jupiter Ascending. “Maybe in March we’ll see this year’s first good movie,” his pal said back, as if Girlhood, Hard to Be a God, Amira & Sam, Timbuktu, Joy of Man’s…
BERLIN — Riding from the Berlin-Tegel airport to my hotel on a crisp, sunny day last week, my cab passed the magnificent golden angel statue known as the Victory Column, a monument erected by the city in 1874 to commemorate assorted Prussian military victories of the day. But people all…
