There is a better, more touching movie hidden somewhere inside The Only Living Boy in New York, and you can often see it creeping in around the edges. It’s not to be found in the somewhat empty coming-of-age narrative at the film’s center, which follows Thomas (Callum Turner), a precocious,…
Taylor Sheridan isn’t afraid to embrace genre. His Wind River plays more like an unusually well-made episode of CSI: Wyoming than the highly anticipated directorial effort from the screenwriter of Hell or High Water (which may well have been last year’s best-written film). Set in the desolate, snow-covered Wind River…
The dictates of Hollywood screenwriting can’t quite constrain the wildness of Jeannette Walls’ family and her best-selling memoir. Despite a tidy resolution, too many scenes whose shapes are immediately familiar from other movies, and an absurd climax that dramatizes the conflict between a daughter and her father through the wheezy…
Rick and Morty airs on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim Here’s a great joke. An unhappy married couple get the chance to view, through the goggles of a dimension-hopping mad scientist, how their lives have played out in an alternate reality. The husband, an insecure drip, goes first. Turns out in…
Comrade Detective premieres August 4 on Amazon Prime. Castlevania streams on Netflix. Only slowly does it become clear that Comrade Detective, a star-driven meta-prank cop-show curio, isn’t supposed to suck. This fact hit me early in the second episode, a full hour into this squirmiest of prestige streaming series, when…
Icarus premieres August 4 on Netflix. Give Putin this: The man knows how to deny his government’s elaborate, outrageous conspiracies violating international laws and norms. To this day, despite the 37 medals that have been stripped from his nation’s Olympians, Putin insists that Russia never engaged in a longrunning campaign…
The Sie FilmCenter is hosting a twenty-film retrospective of Pedro Almodóvar, the brazenly independent filmmaker who has defined Spanish cinema in the post-Franco era and managed to keep his hands unsullied by the Hollywood machine.
I sincerely hope that there’s a five-hour cut of Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit somewhere, a version with cleaner through-lines, deeper characterizations and a more organic narrative. But the version that we have right now — a messy, troubling beast clocking in at around 150 minutes — is riveting in its own…
Jenny Slate’s laughter comes out in a wild gush, as though she’s been shaken and uncorked, the sound somehow puppyishly sweet and punkishly impolite. Her characters, cheery cynics, often fail to quite match the mood of a room, so their amused eruptions can hurt feelings, stir bafflement, inspire the ol’…
It’s August, which means it’s even hotter than July and you need TV now more than ever! The planet is hot, but you watching TV in your underwear with a fan pointed directly at your swimsuit parts is even hotter! Have at it! Manhunt: Unabomber, Aug. 1 (Discovery) Essentially, this…
At 5 p.m. Thursday, I became one of the first people in this country to see The Emoji Movie a second time. (Aside, obviously, from the folks who made it — though I’m not entirely sure that some of them actually bothered to see it all the way through once.)…
It’s hard to imagine a less promising film title than An Inconvenient Sequel. Maybe Another Imposition Upon Your Time? It’s clear, in the opening minutes, as we watch him shake off the slights and smears of his critics, that Al Gore is too savvily upbeat a technocrat to give the…
Officially, the brutish thriller Atomic Blonde takes place in Berlin just before and after the toppling of the Wall, in early November 1989. But this seismic event is really just a backdrop for another epochal marker: the decade that saw the birth of MTV and the height of New German…
You can’t expect a storyteller to wring much suspense out of a real-life plot to assassinate Hitler. In the case of Georg Elser, the subject of Oliver Hirschbiegel’s German drama 13 Minutes, the filmmakers must contend not just with the fact that we know Elser’s 1939 bomb won’t end the…
At 88 years young, the rebel-shaman filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky has led an eclectic life and enjoyed a provocative career not easily encapsulated. His 1970 acid western, El Topo, crowned him godfather of the midnight-movie craze. His phantasmagoric 1973 masterpiece, The Holy Mountain, was ripped off by Kanye West for the…
A “feminist” film need not portray all its female characters in a positive light. Women aren’t a monolith of benevolence. Still, a film with multiple female characters who are equal parts sympathetic and sadistic, who face off against one another in a battle of wits and will, exposing some harsh…
The Incredible Jessica James premieres July 28 on Netflix Sometimes critics and filmmakers agree. We suggested, in our 2015 review of People Places Things, that writer-director James Strouse should please give more screen time to supporting actor Jessica Williams. Now, in his new rom-com for Netflix, The Incredible Jessica James,…
The Last Tycoon premieres July 28 on Amazon Prime Here’s how a fan magazine might profile the hero of The Last Tycoon (Amazon), played by Matt Bomer. His name belongs in marquees, but he deserves a place somewhere higher. Monroe Stahr toils as an angel on Earth, making dreams come…
Kuso premieres on Shudder July 21. It’s nearly impossible to categorize the first feature-length film by Steven Ellison (aka Flying Lotus, the experimental beatmaster, music producer and rapper). Made up of multiple, wildly varied vignettes that intersect and revolve around the theme of a chaotic post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, where every…
At a crater in the lush, mossy-green Mexican countryside in Amat Escalante’s fourth feature, The Untamed, every native species of animal gathers to fuck, like a pornographic Noah’s Ark. This scene of otherworldly magical realism is not what audiences have come to expect from the director, whose most well-known film,…
It must be nice being Luc Besson, stuck at the age of 14 for the past 44 years. Back when I was that age, in the late 1980s, Besson was among my favorite working filmmakers. I adored the earnest wonder of the deep-sea worlds of The Big Blue (1988) and…
Truth in advertising: Girls trip hard during their New Orleans getaway in Girls Trip, which maybe doesn’t need that possessive apostrophe after all. Malcolm D. Lee’s comedy, written by Kenya Barris and Tracy Oliver — the same creative team behind last year’s uneven Barbershop: The Next Cut — pops with…
