The 2Pac biopic All Eyez on Me completes an unofficial trilogy of what we could call the Bad Boy/Death Row cinematic universe. It began with 2009’s Biggie Smalls bio Notorious and continued with NWA’s Straight Outta Compton in 2015. Too bad that, like a lot of trilogies, the third movie…
Queen Sugar airs on OWN In her Netflix documentary The 13th, director Ava DuVernay traces the criminalization of blackness – enacted by a white power structure that ascribed violence and villainy to African-Americans – back to the Emancipation Proclamation. Motivated by political expediency and obvious projection, former slaveowners – with…
Ana Lily Amirpour’s comic post-apocalyptic action-drama offers little explanation of what exactly its “bad batch” is, or how the members of its motley, unfortunate tribe of humans wound up banished to a desert wasteland. Instead, Amirpour lets her camera linger on a sign warning that everything beyond a 10-foot-high metal…
The Book of Henry really wants us to believe that its 12-year-old title character (Jaeden Lieberher) is the smartest kid on Earth. Well, in many ways, he is. He’s a rational, logical thinker who knows how to play the stock market. He handles his family’s finances and works on cute,…
You know him as a good vampire trying to protect humans from bad vampires in the Blade film series. But Wesley Snipes is also an author, and on Thursday, July 27, he’ll be at the Alamo Drafthouse in Sloan’s Lake to celebrate his debut novel, Talon of God. Co-authored by…
At least Rough Night, Lucia Aniello’s dutifully raucous new bachelorette-party comedy, achieves verisimilitude. It’s a rough watch and an evening killer, this film about friends who seem not to love, like or even really know one another. If you enjoy strained fun with people who have grown apart from you,…
Lucia Aniello’s ensemble comedy Rough Night might look, from its marketing, like a gender-flipped Very Bad Things. Both comedies feature a pre-wedding party that goes off the rails when a stripper accidentally gets killed by the rowdiest member of the crew. But Aniello’s film — which stars Scarlett Johansson, Zoë…
Here’s something I never guessed I would say: It might be worth going into the new Cars movie spoiler-free. Without giving anything away, I can tell you that, at its climax, this latest installment in a springtime of sequels the world doesn’t need eases into a surprising new gear and…
A film often smartly attuned to language, Beatriz at Dinner — a sober comedy about class clash and soft-to-hard racism directed by Miguel Arteta and written by Mike White — operates in several different idioms. English and Spanish (sometimes unsubtitled) are spoken, as are the lexicons of healing and affluence…
It’s only after three encounters, a night on molly, a blow-up argument, an impassioned recitation of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “First Fig,” and some tender May-December — late December — sex that Sam Elliott’s The Hero character can be bothered to ask what Laura Prepon’s does for a living. Turns…
It was two weeks before Salma Hayek’s 49th birthday when Mike White told her he was finally going to write that script about the dinner party, the one he’d promised her almost a year earlier. The screenplay would be loosely inspired by a real-life dinner the two had attended, but…
Over the years, Tom Cruise has been many things, but he’s almost never been marginalized — not in one of his own movies. Oh, he’s played supporting parts and done cameos here and there, but even in those smaller roles (in films like Tropic Thunder or Rock of Ages), he…
Since last November, we’ve been asked to understand, if not necessarily sympathize with, the furious resentments of the racists, misogynists, homophobes and plutocrats who have brought us to this point of political calamity. The fifth season of Orange Is the New Black (Netflix) appears to be its own kind of…
A couple years into his supposed retirement, the 80-year-old Ken Loach showed up at Cannes with I, Daniel Blake and proceeded to win the Palme d’Or (his second, after 2006’s The Wind that Shakes the Barley). The film follows an aging carpenter (Dave Johns) with a heart problem and a…
Sure, we’ve all gotten desensitized to screen violence, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be shocked. Ken Loach’s quietly furious I, Daniel Blake will likely jolt you with its depiction of a different kind of killing: the paperwork, on-hold music and long-wait rigmarole a widowed English woodworker endures while trying…
The trailer for Henry Koster’s 1952 adaptation of My Cousin Rachel channels hysteria as the voiceover asks, “Was she woman or witch? Madonna or murderess?” Unfortunately, the film itself proved far tamer than the marketing suggested. The novel’s author, Daphne du Maurier, who also penned The Birds and the psychological…
A red door is, biblically speaking, a sign of protection, an echo of the blood rubbed on posts and lintels during Passover to keep God from smiting you and your home. But like most things that the Bible insists are positive, the red door also comes with an undercurrent of…
The 2017 Cannes Film Festival wrapped up last Sunday with a slate of generally predictable (and perfectly worthwhile) awards. And while it may have been a somewhat lackluster year for the festival’s main competition, there were plenty of cinematic treasures to be found on the Croisette – even a couple…
It’s summer! Time to stay inside and watch TV! Duh! I’m Dying Up Here (Showtime), June 4 Peak TV giveth, and Peak TV taketh away. And sometimes Peak TV confuses the shit outta ye. Case in point: this new drama about LA’s stand-up comedy scene in the 70s. I mean,…
Summer movie season is coming to a theater near you. The multiplexes stock up on big, bold blockbusters and arthouses pack their rafters with specialty programming and cinematic adventures.
In July 1985, Videotique opened in Capitol Hill as the Denver’s latest video store. Now, 32 years later, the shop’s owners have announced it will shutter its doors at the end of June.
I’m Dying Up Here premieres June 4 on Showtime Mythologies are built on pain. It’s why nations remember the invasions they’ve suffered better than the ones they’ve perpetrated, why religions celebrate their martyrs, and why Disney princesses — among the most privileged individuals in their respective kingdoms — sing about…
