Chasing Coral premieres July 14 on Netflix. In February of 1995 Charlton Heston called Rush Limbaugh’s radio program to read from Jurassic Park – the book, not the movie. In his best Old Testament boom, Heston declaimed a speech about man’s hubris that Michael Crichton had written for Dr. Ian…
To the Bone premieres July 14 on Netflix About 10 minutes into Marti Noxon’s eating-disorder drama, To the Bone, Ellen (Lily Collins) sneaks away from her overbearing stepmom, Susan (Carrie Preston), to chug warm water from a public-bathroom faucet (a trick to fool the body into thinking it’s full so…
Jeff Orlowski grew up wanting to be a nature photographer. But like so many in that field, his work now focuses less on capturing Earth’s natural wonders than it does on cataloguing their steady demise. “This is an entire field of professionals who are witnessing firsthand the falling apart of…
The new tech comedy Loaded (AMC) opens seconds before the finalization of the sale of a game app called Cat Factory for £300 million. Confirmation from his bank that his account balance has gone from several hundred quid in the red to David Cameron’s tax bracket propels lead designer Josh…
Though it’s a phlegmatic, sometimes stumbling thriller, Moka, directed and co-written by Frédéric Mermoud, still has its share of gripping suspense. These tense moments arise not from any plot machinations but from the anticipation of the next exquisitely calibrated response by Emmanuelle Devos, the film’s star, who appears in every…
Dueling images of Catholic nuns portray either holier-than-thou punishers in habits or hippie types with acoustic guitars, like the postulant Maria in The Sound of Music. Both stereotypes obscure the fact that, in real life, a lot of nuns are just … kind of weird. At one of the many…
Somehow, while we were worrying about superheroes and star destroyers and hot rods and whether Captain America could beat up Superman or whatever, the goddamned Planet of the Apes movies became the most vital and resonant big-budget film series in the contemporary movie firmament. And they did it with the…
The Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues has called The Ornithologist, which follows a lone bird expert in a remote northern part of the country, an “adventure film.” It’s a genre he fantastically destabilizes to encompass martyrdom, transmigration of the soul, and wild revelers cavorting in Mirandese, a nearly extinct language…
The pitch for The Big Sick might sound like a tacky weepie you’d have been afraid to watch on TV in the 1990s. But it’s hard to do justice to the balancing act that the creators of this singular comedy have achieved. Based on events in the life of star…
Snowfall airs Wednesdays on FX Days before the Tupac Shakur biopic All Eyez on Me premiered, the news hit that John Singleton’s original script for the project opened the rapper’s story with Tupac being raped in prison. Singleton had left the ill-fated film twice before Benny Boom stepped in to…
As Cole Porter once sang, “It’s too darn hot.” The only institution guaranteed to be a haven from the heat and a hub of cold, fizzy drinks is the cinema, and this July there’s a slew of movies for you to watch and chill out with.
I hate July. It’s hot and there’s less TV. Nevertheless, she sweated through her bra and wrote this guide to what’s worth watching. Snowfall (FX), July 5. Justified’s Dave Andron teams up with director John Singleton for a drama about the start of the crack-cocaine epidemic in LA. Andron describes…
Maudie is hit-or-miss, but you’ll probably bawl anyway. Its creators have elected to dramatize nothing but the things that traditional narrative features usually botch. The film, directed by Aisling Walsh, surveys the life of a beloved artist, Nova Scotia’s self-taught folk painter Maud Lewis, who produced scores of cheerily primitive…
What will become of Zion? No, not the loosely defined term for a Jewish homeland in the Middle East, but a mild-mannered and fundamentally righteous shopkeeper living in Jerusalem and pulled between conservative religious forces and modernity. (Oh, so maybe I do mean the Jewish homeland in the Middle East.)…
Most hero stories dating back to Achilles are fantasies of power, of the world made right through violence. What sets Spider-Man apart, outside his joyous bouncing through New York City, is that his stories are also fantasies of responsibility. Rather than just kick bad-guy ass, Spider-Man must forever fight to…
The House on Coco Road premieres on Netflix on June 30. Quick, tell me everything you know about Grenada. If you’re over the age of 35, you can probably remember Ronald Reagan’s thin lips pronouncing the country’s name with a dangerous emphasis on the first two syllables, essentially weaponizing the…
Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver is a remorselessly entertaining, impeccably assembled action-musical in which cars and people defy the laws of physics and common sense. They leap into gunfire and hop over hoods and careen down streets in perfect time to the beats of an unimpeachably cool soundtrack. It’s all absurd,…
Considering how Donald Trump recently made a big deal about canceling the previous administration’s plans to ease relations with Cuba — even calling for the island to extradite revolutionary, alleged cop killer, political fugitive and Tupac godmother Assata Shakur back to America — you know it’s a matter of time before someone…
Hollywood has many more outstanding actors than it does outstanding scripts. That’s the only way to explain Naomi Watts’ career, which launched stateside with a masterful twin performance in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. Even with a pair of Oscar nominations, though, the actress has spent years languishing in Nondescript Mom…
In the run-up to this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Bong Joon-ho’s Okja was one of the most mysterious titles in the Official Competition lineup. Then, after people had seen it, Okja turned out to be … one of the most mysterious titles in the Official Competition lineup. Now that it’s…
King Arthur is neither Guy Ritchie’s worst film nor his best, but it might well be his most frustrating. A compendium of all the things that make the British director so occasionally exciting and so often irritating, this new, hyper-stylized take on the Arthurian legends veers between genius and idiocy…
Who knew Cate Blanchett wanted to be Tracey Ullman? That’s probably not the reaction director Julian Rosefeldt hopes will be stirred by this rigorous series of monologues, stitched together from more than 50 artistic and political manifestos and performed by Blanchett as 13 characters. But, like Ullman, Blanchett takes the…
