It’s Good Coop/Bad Coop in the First Four Episodes of Twin Peaks

Yes, there’s spoilers below for this unspoilable show. “Don’t let yourself be hurt this time,” sings Julee Cruise on “Falling,” the plushly minimalist 1989 synth ballad that, a year later, stripped of its vocal and lyrics, would become the opening theme for Twin Peaks. David Lynch himself wrote that lyric,…

Tina Fey Keeps Up Her Kimmy Schmidt Laugh Streak — and Her Obstinacy

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt streams on Netflix Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’s disparate obsessions form an unwieldy constellation, like a winged horse with three eyes and a blobfish for a tail. Tina Fey’s Netflix comedy mines one-liners from doomsday cults, parenthood, the gig economy, 1990s pop culture, feminine accommodation and the Upper East…

Cannes 2017: The Lost Children of Wonderstruck and Loveless

Last year’s Cannes Festival seemed to be all about the past, trauma, and the persistence of memory. It’s too early in this year’s festival to suss out any broad themes, but the one-two punch of Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck and Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless, the first two Official Competition titles to screen,…

Confessions of a Reservoir Dogs Naysayer

Despite my fondness for Quentin Tarantino, I’ve never been a Reservoir Dogs fan. Back in 1992, the writer-director’s feature debut seemed to me little more than a clever and grotesquely violent one-act play, gussied up with structural whimsy. Yes, the opening scene — black-suited crooks bantering about Madonna and the…

Chuck Wepner, the Inspiration for Rocky, Gets His Movie Moment

Heavyweight almost-champ Chuck Wepner was a character long before he inspired Sylvester Stallone to pen Rocky. But Wepner is no Rocky Balboa. Sure, he comes from a working-class town (Bayonne, New Jersey), and when he boxed, he took a good punch, bled like a hemophiliac and dreamed of taking home…

12 Reasons You Shouldn’t Fear 2017’s Summer Movie Season

Pour one out for the summer movie season, which was once Memorial Day till Labor Day but now has spread like a self-replicating, geometrically evolving A.I. determined to cleanse the Earth of human vermin. Around the turn of the century, the summer movies started showing up the first weekend in…

Readers: New Alamo a Welcome Addition, or More Colfax Gentrification?

The Alamo Drafthouse opened a theater at 4255 West Colfax Avenue this week, in the rapidly changing Sloan’s Lake area. This is the Texas-based chain’s second location in metro Denver, and it has blockbuster ambitions for cutting-edge programming. But at least one reader doesn’t appreciate this artistic addition to the neighborhood.

Vodoun Blood Rituals Reunite Gender-Bending Spouses in Bight of the Twin

Spouses can develop special bonds, but there may be no couple who took that bond more seriously than performance artists Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Lady Jaye P-Orridge. The couple underwent surgeries to become mirror images of each other, turning into “the Pandrogyne,” an all-gender-inclusive spiritual entity of their own creation.

Crime in Counterpoint: Michael Mann on his Restored Masterpiece Heat

Michael Mann’s 1995 masterpiece, Heat, comes out this week in a brand-new, fully loaded and beautiful Blu-ray edition. To explore further what makes this epochal crime drama so special, I recently talked to the director. The story of Heat was based on real-life personalities. There was real thief named Neil…

Aziz Ansari’s Master of None Achieves Mastery at Last

Master of None streams on Netflix There was never any doubt about the thoughtfulness with which Aziz Ansari, in the first season of his Netflix series, Master of None, addressed the kinds of societal divides — racial, cultural, generational, sexual — that most sitcoms either lack the vision to perceive…

Celebrating the Radical Female Gaze of Amazon’s I Love Dick

I Love Dick streams on Amazon starting Friday, May 12 I Love Dick, the epistolary novel, is an obsessive confessional story from a woman — a version of the author Chris Kraus — who, in her letters, lusts for an English art critic named Dick. He barely returns the affection…