Again, Gyllenhaal is the main draw here, turning in a career-best performance, though the emphasis on film makes The Deuce’s sophomore season more self-reflexive and more focused than the first
When Burt Reynolds passed away yesterday, much was made of his Florida connections. The star of classics such as Deliverance and Boogie Nights graduated from Palm Beach High School and played football at Florida State University. With the star power to be crowned box office champ every year from 1978 to 1982…
Spastic and impressionistic, Random Acts of Flyness is the free jazz of television, a searing collage of black life in America with a rhythm all its own
Bujalski frames most of Support the Girls as an almost real-time delineation of chaos, but his storytelling elegance — delicate, nearly invisible foreshadowing; cogent evocations of backstory — adds reflective layers to the surface anarchy
Ryder and Reeves spend the entire movie preoccupied only with one another, despite their characters’ intimate associations with the betrothed couple
Filmed in black and white in the wintry countryside of Görlitz, Germany, Schwentke’s vision of a man who would be posthumously named the Executioner of Emsland is chilling and yet, at times, almost farcical
Like many Gothic tales, The Little Stranger hangs tantalizingly between genres: It has elements of haunted house thriller, of doomed romance, of psychological thriller, of historical allegory
… Like that of I Love You, America, Cohen’s apparent goal of exploring America’s multitudes belies his show’s actual focus on belittling, baiting or simply giving a platform to white Americans in particular
What becomes clear, watching McEnroe harangue line judges and intrusive photographers, is that the rages were birthed in a disappointed agony, a disgust at a world with inhabitants who persistently failed to see what he did
This is a story of stifling manners and oppressive codes of conduct, where the wealthy “villains” wear a strained smile and an icky sheen of privilege
Its unruly scenes emerge out of disorder, out of chants and shrieks and fractured images, and always threaten to fade back into abstraction
This is a portrait of a decades-long partnership coming to a head but also of the American literary community reckoning with what so many know to be true: Women are still not seen as “serious” writers or contenders for major prizes
Peretz could have given each potential pairing equal time in the story, but he sticks with the most evocative of the two; Juliet, Naked has its charms, and they are named Rose Byrne and Ethan Hawke
Weitz’s film, concerning a Mossad team’s 1960 hunt for Eichmann, is a sort of Argo Goes to Munich, blending heist movie jollies with some moral inquiry into justice, revenge, torture and execution
The film’s wrenching centerpiece is the 2014 death of Eric Garner, killed due to “compression of neck, compression of chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police” who suspected him of selling loose cigarettes
At its best, the show was a canny deconstruction of contemporary late-night comedy, which has been swamped with political satire since Stewart, the former Daily Show host, turned Bush-era liberal outrage comedy into its very own TV genre
Happytime Murders, though, demands that we take its world somewhat seriously, that we invest ourselves in the tensions between people and puppets, that we buy into its by-the-book serial-killer narrative …
When’s the last time you saw a narrative feature with a genre that was so shrewdly unfixed that you genuinely had no idea what would — or could — happen next?
Secrets get exposed, cultural barriers get smashed and re-erected, and every apparent villain will prove heroic and every hero something of a villain
… I imagined how whatever scene I was watching might have been staged and shot and acted out in a more traditional film — and I was inevitably disappointed by what has been lost …
The case turns, at first, on a tricky legal question: Did this man commit a robbery and then a murder, or did he murder his victim and then happen to take his wallet?
Though Moselle’s narrative feature debut, Skate Kitchen, tells a fictional story, the director again draws heavily from her subjects’ own personal histories, this time constructing a story about teen girls finding themselves and each other at the local skate park
