Arts & Culture

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

This new version, directed by Danish filmmaker Michael Noer, brings to the story a refreshing intensity and sweep, and even a sense of adventure

Though it’s been assembled from all types of footage over many years, Minding the Gap is visually mesmerizing, and the fact that the director belongs to this subculture turns the film’s style into a kind of philosophical stance

Scandal ensues when the charming Nick Young (Henry Golding), secretly heir to a wealthy Chinese-Singaporean real estate fortune, brings his accomplished, lower-class Chinese-American girlfriend, Rachel Chu (Fresh Off The Boat’s Constance Wu), home for his best friend’s wedding

Through the stories of how these teens ended up at God’s Promise, Cameron Post suggests the rigid hegemony of American life, the all-too-common story of religious belief perverted in the service of fitting in

… It’s a hero-dude adventure movie based on a Michael Crichton-esque paperback techno-thriller, which means we hear more science talk than is strictly necessary, get a tour of a gleaming research facility and meet a billionaire finder (Rainn Wilson) who just might have ulterior motives

Miriam (Léa Drucker) has quit her job and absconded with the family’s two kids — 11-year-old Julien (Thomas Gioria) and almost-18 Josephine (Mathilde Auneveux) — after, she explains, experiences of spousal and child abuse

After receiving a 1,000-piece jigsaw as a gift at that party, Agnes discovers a surprise talent and passion: She can put one together in just a chunk of an afternoon

Based on a crazy true story (or, as an opening title puts it, “some fo’ real, fo’ real shit”), BlacKkKlansman follows the efforts of Ron Stallworth (John David Washington), an African-American detective in the Colorado Springs police force

An assemblage of TV clips sets the stage: Ninety percent of all children have died within the space of a month, with the survivors gaining a variety of superpowers that the government catalogs in a color-coded chart ripped right from the Bush administration

… Like Father, it turns out, is an emotional, heartfelt depiction of what it’s really like to reconnect with a loved one after they’ve hurt you irreparably, but with some solid laugh lines and none of the melodramatic sap

This year, Florida’s premier horror film festival, Popcorn Frights, moves its series of chilling works to Savor Cinema in Fort Lauderdale. The festival gave New Times film critics Juan Antonio Barquin and Hans Morgenstern a preview of several of the movies premiering at the festival. Here’s their guide to the films you must see and ones to miss, ranging from science fiction to zombie horror and ghost stories.

Greenfield searches for commonalities between her subjects, linking the tacky and Trumpy nouveau riche to the strippers and pornographic performers who embody her conviction that for American women the body itself is a commodity

… It’s as scattered and disorienting as the infamous LP Having Fun With Elvis On Stage, an official cheapie that consisted of nothing but the King’s between-songs ‘70s stage banter

McKinnon has for a couple of years now been on a collision course with just this sort of role, one that, in order to fulfill the dictates of programmatic movie plotting, demands she surrender much of what audiences love about Kate McKinnon