You can be forgiven for thinking that the new show from Dan Harmon, creator of Community and Rick and Morty, might come off as niche. Available on the new comedy streaming service Seeso, Harmonquest features comedians playing Pathfinder — a tabletop role-playing game similar to Dungeons and Dragons — in…
Barbara Kopple’s Miss Sharon Jones! tells the kind of true story that makes you want to kick creation itself square in the crotch. Here’s that firecracker soul singer, nearing her 60s, her boogie still majestic, her band still a tight retro marvel, her wail still the southern end of a northbound…
Natalie Portman proves herself a filmmaker of intelligence, ambition and inventiveness in her debut as a director and writer — just not one who is always certain as a storyteller. A Tale of Love and Darkness adapts, with a passionate somberness, several threads from Amos Oz’s autobiographical novel of the…
In contemporary film, it’s typical for an African-American character to be the sole person of color in the story, only existing to reveal hidden racism or make white people uncomfortable with themselves. Black characters rarely get to talk to other black characters. Last year, Manohla Dargis suggested a new Bechdel-type…
The sarcastic wag who first drawled the phrase “as exciting as watching grass grow” never intended it as a compliment. But have you ever actually watched grass grow? I mean, I haven’t either, but there must be a pretty cool hidden world of fresh-smelling earth and tickly dew and bugs…
Don’t let the uptick in big-cast movies fool you: Ensemble films are difficult to make. When a script gets a projected budget in creative development, “ensemble” adds dollar signs and story challenges. Each actor needs to get a moment in the star circle, and each is competing for top billing…
Critics often dismiss blockbuster entertainments with the vague, half-assed complaint that they resemble “video games.” Movies like Fede Alvarez’s Don’t Breathe reveal games’ actual influence — for the better. The breakthrough with studio horror films in recent years, since the found-footage boom, is a welcome environmental immersiveness. It’s a testament…
Just like there’s a bizarro internet where Donald Trump is celebrated as a warm, loving, generous, successful businessman who really wants to earn a Purple Heart, I wonder if there’s also a bizarro, ravenous audience awaiting a feature-film reenactment of Donald and Melania’s epic first date. (He literally tricked his…
Robert De Niro — the Raging Bull himself, now aged from boxer to trainer — is introduced in Hands of Stone bathed in Madison Square Garden’s overhead spotlights, more the image of a reigning champ than the promising fighter whose American debut his character Ray Arcel has come to see…
It’s hard out there for a TV comedy fan. That’s the case for network television, at least. Before All in the Family altered the TV comedy landscape, most sitcoms hewed closely to the formula of solving minor annoyances in 22 minutes (with the occasional “OMG Vincent Price in Hawaii” curveball)…
Everybody’s favorite four-seat, mobile, musical movie house — Davey B. Gravey’s Tiny Cinema — has been zipping around Colorado this summer, delighting handfuls of moviegoers one little 8mm film at a time. And now, just as the sun begins to set on summer, the Cinema will bring its magic to…
Late in Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World, his unsurprisingly wry, quizzical documentary survey on life inside and beside the virtual world, Werner Herzog stumps two brain researchers with a lyrical question in that instantly recognizable (and often parodied) German accent: “Does the internet dream of itself?” An ever-adventurous…
From its opening image — of a distraught woman battling massive ocean waves on a moonlit night — to its surprisingly ambiguous final shot — of what, I won’t say — Kubo and the Two Strings sears itself into your brain. The stop-motion animation studio Laika has perfected, over the…
In a summer of disappointing reboots, underperforming sequels and rejected franchise bait, Ben-Hur is something rare: a remake no one asked for but weary moviegoers might accept as a small gift for lack of any better option. Timur Bekmambetov’s reimagining of William Wyler’s 1959 epic, itself preceded by two silent…
Anna Gunn actually gets to do things in Meera Menon’s expansive high-finance drama Equity, which is almost reason enough to recommend it right there. The Breaking Bad co-star tears into the role of a rainmaking banker taking a Silicon Valley company public. For once it’s Gunn whose character gets to…
Once, American comedies concerned underdog heroes who challenged the status quo and seized the territory of the upper-class characters who thought they were in control. Slobs vs. snobs. During the wartime administration of the lesser President Bush, the wealthy thoroughly dominated the culture, occupying America the way the army patrolled…
Michael German went undercover with white supremacists for a year and with right-wing militants for another eight months and now he wants to set some things straight. “One of the things I learned working undercover is that the studies that the FBI or even academia had on these groups were…
Hey. Do you guys remember puppet comedian Jeff Dunham, whose downtrodden Mexican “on a steeeek” character José Jalapeño delighted many a middle-class white American in the ’90s? Well, imagine he blazed up a joint with Bill Maher, wrote a manifesto on atheism and then made a multimillion-dollar animated feature film…
Visibility of the LGBTQ community in new media and pop culture continues to rise, and adding to it is the new web series Her Story. The trans-forward series is getting an in-depth presentation, complete with its creators and talent, and courtesy of the GLBT Community Center of Colorado and the Sie FilmCenter,…
Nuts!, a marvelous, mostly animated doc/drama hybrid, couldn’t have come along at a better time. Director Penny Lane (Our Nixon) showcases, with wit and suspense, the undoing of one of the 20th century’s great flimflam artists, a huckster who seized then-new communication technologies — and the trappings of Christian divinity…
The Bronx is burning in the introductory episodes of The Get Down, Netflix’s new series that presents as urban-cinematic fable the genesis of rap. The cluttered, over-caffeinated 90-minute pilot, directed by creator and executive producer Baz Luhrmann, takes place in the summer of 1977, when a serial killer terrorized New…
Writer Keith Gessen once said that Philip Roth wasn’t a misogynist and didn’t hate women because he spent all his time “thinking about fucking them.” But he did concede that Roth probably thought “women were a foreign country.” In James Schamus’ debut feature Indignation, an adaptation of a late Roth…
