In 2015, House of Cards’ fourth season had President Francis Underwood (Kevin Spacey) confessing a murder to his secretary of state, ICO (the series’ fictional ISIS) beheading a guy on live TV, lone journalist Tom Hammerschmidt (Boris McGiver) dogging the president with corruption charges, data scientist Aidan MacAllan (Damian Young)…
For some reason, I can’t bring myself to hate Jim Brockmire. Played by comedian Hank Azaria, best known for his voice work on The Simpsons, Brockmire wears a perpetually wounded and somewhat confused expression, the look of a man coming off a bender who can’t find his car. His loud,…
Perhaps Wonder Woman’s greatest superpower is enduring for the past 75 years as a wildly unstable signifier. Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman, starring Gal Gadot in the title role, further adds to this complicated, contradictory cluster of signs and symbols. Forged from deeply feminist sympathies, the character debuted in All Star…
There will always be, it’s become clear, one more Winston Churchill story to tell: one more slant on a weekend, a summer, a year in the life of the 20th century’s most formidable leader, a man whose history includes two world wars and speeches so glorious that future dramatizations were…
With his bow-legged power-walk, low-boil narcissism and tough-guy snarl, Brad Pitt is the comic ghost in David Michod’s all-too-real War Machine. The film, which is premiering on Netflix this week (and also getting an extremely limited theatrical release), was inspired by the late Michael Hastings’s book The Operators: The Wild…
“I can’t ensure I will not be disappeared in the future,” Joshua Wong says, deep into Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower, Joe Piscatella’s rousing, terrifying thriller of a documentary. He says it a little distractedly, as though his own life is an afterthought when considered against the scope of his movement…
Imagine a remake of Cape Fear shot like Kubrick’s The Shining, with Max Cady recast as a child, and you’ll have some idea of the strangeness of Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer. The film has quickly proved to be one of the most divisive titles at this…
In the run-up to this year’s festival, Bong Joon-ho’s Okja was one of the most mysterious titles in the Official Selection lineup. Now that people have seen it, Okja has turned out to be…one of the most mysterious titles in the Official Selection lineup. What is it, exactly? A children’s…
From A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night to The Bad Batch, director Ana Lily Amirpour isn’t afraid to take risks. Her latest features A-list actors including Keanu Reeves, Jim Carrey, Jason Momoa, Giovanni Ribisi and Diego Luna.
Baywatch kinda baffled me. This R-rated comedy adaptation of the cheesy but sincere beach-set action series — which somehow became a worldwide phenomenon in the 1990s — is a movie that should be as enjoyably ridiculous as its source material. In some instances, it is. Director Seth Gordon (Horrible Bosses)…
Solid rule of thumb: Never accept strawberries from strangers on the street, no matter how good-looking the fruit or well-spoken the unknown person. But maybe that’s just me. For Clare (Teresa Palmer), the intrepid Australian backpacker who in Berlin Syndrome finds herself imprisoned in a Berlin apartment by a romantic…
If nothing else, Alien: Covenant is the most ambitious Alien film ever made. It’s almost as if Ridley Scott, foiled in his recent attempts at biblical epics, metaphysical dramas and thorny psychosexual thrillers, decided to revisit those genres under cover of a prized franchise sequel. That’s not to suggest that…
A light and cheery appraisal of a somber subject, Vanessa Gould’s documentary Obit focuses on the writers and editors assigned to the necrology desk of The New York Times. Like other chronicles of dead-tree media made in the past decade — The September Issue, R.J. Cutler’s Vogue ode (2009); Andrew…
Don’t expect Amir Bar-Lev’s Long Strange Trip, a sweeping if not very penetrating look at the 30-year career of the Grateful Dead, to offer major revelations. For any Deadhead — and it’s hard to imagine any other kind of viewer settling in for the four-hour running time — the basic…
Thomas Vinterberg’s The Commune is partly autobiographical: The Danish director of The Celebration and The Hunt lived in a commune between the ages of 7 and 19, at a time when collective living had become popular in Scandinavia. (The phenomenon also inspired Swedish director Lukas Moodysson’s 2000 masterpiece, Together.) Maybe…
Yes, dead men tell no tales — but neither, really, do the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Rather than stories, the series, of which this 2017 entry is the fifth, offers an unpalatable mix of mincing slapstick, rote derring-do, ponderous CGI, whiskery sea-chanty mysticism, and dutiful action sequences whose only…
In Robin Swicord’s Wakefield, an adaptation of the late E.L. Doctorow’s short story of the same name, disillusioned lawyer Howard Wakefield (Bryan Cranston) chases a raccoon from his decrepit backhouse and … never returns. The story’s not science fiction; Howard doesn’t get swallowed by a black hole. He’s still among…
Both the poet’s body and soul are made ineradicable in Davies’ lovely film.
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,…
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…
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,…
It might be surprising to realize that David Lynch has only ever made one period piece: The Elephant Man (1980), set in the Victorian era. The rest of the director’s films, save for his 1984 sci-fi disaster Dune, take place in what presumably is the here and now. Or, more…
