Film, TV & Streaming

The Looming Tower is a show about the human relationships that keep systems functioning — and how when those relationships break down, the system does, too

No other series even attempts to capture the tremendous variety within Asian America, much less to do so unassumingly

Potter isn’t what you’d call subtle, but she also knows not to overstay her welcome, and this pithy comedy is a masterclass in all that a filmmaker can squeeze from the most basic theatrical concept …

The director seems to be in pursuit of a broader tapestry: The Russia he presents is a wasteland of survival, where a woman’s only hope is pairing off with a moneyed man

The film gives only the most paltry consideration to geopolitics, to relations between the U.S. and Russia or America’s own corrupt operations

This year’s Colorado Environmental Film Festival highlights 56 films from ten countries, including the world premiere of How We Grow, a feature-length documentary following millennial farmers in Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley.

The chemistry between Bateman and McAdams explodes in every scene and only grows stronger when, over the course of one very long and dangerous night, their characters get caught up in conspiracy

In the second season of the new One Day at a Time, it seems like everyone in the Cuban-American Alvarez family faces a crisis of their own that reminds them to hold onto each other

It’s often inspired in its cutting and composition, and Garland (Ex Machina) has crafted sequences of strange splendor, including a too-short cosmic light show

The characters talk extensively about what matters to them rather than what matters to the plot, exposing themselves, sharing the worries that keep them up at night

Also just like History, Period offers a chance for comedians and the actors who love them to play dress-up and goof off in a period-piece setting

An episodic ensemble drama organized around the logic of theme rather than of traditional narrative, the film concerns above all else accumulation and dispersal, in the American vein

In Between is a movie not so much about suffering as it is about the grinding reality of just being

Soozandeh wastes no time establishing both the hypocrisy of the devout in Iran (or America, or Gilead) and his Short Cuts-ian tapestry of characters

In the tense but hearty Chilean drama A Fantastic Woman, actress Daniela Vega plays a transwoman, Marina, who must navigate life after the death of her lover

It’s a twisty-turny crime drama complete with stolen money, vengeful mob bosses and all sorts of strange coincidences and random dialogue digressions

The narrative is needlessly complicated, and it all seems crafted just to build to a single joke voiced in the third act

Here’s the Marvel movie even non-Marvel fans are prepared to root for, the rare black superhero film, one boasting not only an almost-all black cast but helmed by a black director as well

The only fantasies Fifty Shades Freed convincingly fulfills are those of boutique publishers who would like to believe that a debut novel can acquire 250,000 preorders and that a local glossy can employ upwards of 50 full-time staffers, both of which occur in this film

… While the film does insist on its own irreverence a bit too much at the outset — it opens with a group of birds inspirationally singing, “You’re only as small as your dreams,” before they get abruptly knocked out of the sky — it offers plenty of lively fun once it settles down …

The Ritual finds a quartet of British lads/drips hiking through the deserted woods of northern Sweden, a labyrinth of ancient trees with trunks that stretch up forever

I’m Time’s Up-invigorated and ready to BURN IT ALL DOWN, so please take all my recommendations with a grain of salt, because if it stars a white man, I’d like to see it in the garbage can