Maybe this’ll teach us not to judge a movie by its marketing campaign. Thanks to posters and trailers focused solely on its American star, Matt Damon, Zhang Yimou’s The Great Wall has been pilloried as an example of a Chinese myth being given the Hollywood white-savior treatment. In fact, the…
Television’s smartest network drama went out last year with a slap. The Good Wife, the hour-long CBS procedural about savvy lawyers and sexy investigators, looked as if it was going to end where it began, with Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) standing by her politician husband Peter (Chris Noth) at a…
Romantic comedies seem to have soured more than most movie genres. It could be due to their insistence on happy endings, or perhaps it’s the rigid structure that demands easily avoidable conflict followed by the protagonist breathlessly chasing down his or her true love just in time for the end…
In recent months, there have been serious calls for liberal city dwellers to reach beyond their “bubble” to better understand their rural counterparts. What’s rarely brought into the conversation: that large swathes of the so-called liberal elite have roots in rural places. These people, myself included, came of age among…
Even zombies need sensible snacks. In Sheila Hammond’s case, that means a baggie of severed fingers, which she munches like baby carrots while stalking her next victim in a parking garage, her pink “kill poncho” pulled tightly around her shoulders. In Santa Clarita Diet, the new 10-episode Netflix original series,…
In 1902, Dr. John Kellogg changed two letters in the word “sanatorium” — defined as a resting spot for disabled soldiers — and changed the world. “Sanitariums” became the health resort of choice for the wealthy and weary, instilling in the privileged a sense that they were perpetually ill, and…
The movies never get the Midwest right. When, onscreen, have you seen white people at the grocery store mouth that shy, apologetic “oop” noise every time someone walks close enough that they feel they must shift out of the way? Or a father lecturing his children about the greatness of…
Like just about everyone else, MUBI has gotten into the distribution business — in a way. The streaming service, a favorite among cinephiles, has been offering a curated selection of arthouse titles for years: 30 movies at a time, each available for 30 days. Its new Discoveries platform, which seeks…
Legion, the much-anticipated new FX series created by Fargo showrunner Noah Hawley, wastes no time plunging us into the murky depths of its lead’s unraveling mind, from blissful youth to harrowing adulthood plagued by a failed suicide attempt. Every scene is a dense visual and sonic cornucopia. Even quiet moments…
George Miller’s sci-fi series began in 1979 with the low-budget, practically DIY gearhead grindhouse flick Mad Max, and it was revived in 2015 with the delirious action masterpiece Mad Max: Fury Road. All along the way, these pictures have captured something about their times that has allowed them to break…
Boundaries are violated repeatedly in Fifty Shades Darker, a film that demands even more submission of its audience than its predecessor, 2015’s Fifty Shades of Grey. No safeword can protect you from the sequel’s depleting incoherence, its punishing pileup of plot and its inability to successfully stage, even once, the…
Denver’s date with actor Cary Elwes and The Princess Bride: An Inconceivable Evening on April 21 was announced just ten days ago, but demand for tickets has been so strong that a second show has been added at the Paramount Theatre on April 20.
Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman is a tense, visceral drama of wounded masculinity — and therein lies part of its problem. Farhadi, whose About Elly and A Separation are two of the greatest movies of the past decade, can find tension in the most mundane of exchanges, and he…
Contemporary American horror’s obsession with morality and psychotherapy can really be a downer. In 2002, Gore Verbinski expertly remade the J-horror hit Ringu with a layered story about a single mother (Naomi Watts) who watches a cursed videotape. To stop the curse, she travels through the warped psyche of the…
First, the good news: The dog doesn’t die in John Wick: Chapter 2. This will come as a relief to some of us who adored the original, an action masterpiece about a retired hitman taking unholy revenge on the Russian scumbags who killed his pup and stole his car. The…
Given that it’s a sequel/spinoff built around a mostly throwaway gag in The LEGO Movie, The LEGO Batman Movie is funnier than you might think it has any right to be. But those of us who were expecting something more can’t help but feel a twinge of disappointment. The LEGO…
Suburban teendom often means killing time, auditioning selves, inhabiting the you that you can pull off for now but also maybe worrying about the you you’ll aim for next. Few films honor that uncertain aimlessness like Tim Sutton’s Dark Night, an anthro-fiction offering exquisitely framed long-take looks at Sarasota teenagers…
We made it to February! Hooray us! Hey, it wasn’t a guarantee, and I’m so proud of us all. As a reward, make sure to watch every single one of these TV shows this month, and I don’t want to hear any excuses! You deserve it. The Quad (BET), Feb…
In the world of cinema, February finds us climbing excitedly out of the wasteland that is January and into this month’s embrace of new films that are sure to hook audiences. Not to mention, there are plenty of special screenings of Academy Award-nominated films in anticipation of the ceremony this…
The title offers the first clue about what’s off. Calling this movie The Comedian suggests that Robert De Niro will be playing something definitive or archetypal, as if there’s just one kind of standup comic, as if he’s representing a genus rather than embodying someone singular. A glut of other…
James Baldwin passed away in 1987. Well, that’s partially true. He indeed succumbed to stomach cancer at age 63, but most of his life essence remained, via his books and essays deconstructing American culture. Filmmaker Raoul Peck (Lumumba, Sometimes in April) has been a Baldwin devotee since reading The Fire…
Like Ava DuVernay’s 13th, Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro travels a straight, well-researched path from the darkest tragedies of American history to the ones that plague the country today. Both films filter African-American life through the prism of the societal construct called race, but while DuVernay’s dissertation focuses…
