At their best, Michel Gondry’s movies are sad in a way that makes you not want to be happy. The problem is that Gondry’s best doesn’t extend far beyond Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, that dream-weaving romance from more than a decade back, and scattered moments from subsequent films:…
Something troubling is afoot in Westeros: The heroes are beginning to outnumber the villains. The sixth season of Game of Thrones has already seen Jon Snow’s return from the dead, Arya Stark’s vision restored and — courtesy of two Stark children’s long-awaited reunion — the show’s first-ever tears of joy…
Even by the standards of Yorgos Lanthimos, The Lobster’s premise is a doozy: Colin Farrell plays a recently single schlub forced to report to the Hotel, where he has 45 days to form a romantic relationship lest he be turned into an animal of his choosing. This is the plight…
Is it too much to ask that all these holiday-themed rom-coms — Valentine’s Day, New Year’s Eve and now Mother’s Day — one day merge with the Halloween movies? Michael Myers might be the only one in either franchise with a truly cutting response to all the rhetorical musings about relationships romantic,…
Some free advice: If you ever find yourself defensively reminding people that you’re not in a cult, you’re probably in a cult. This comes up early and often in The Path, Hulu’s new series premiering on March 30th, not that any adherents of the fictional Meyerist Movement seem fazed by…
Ask weary WWE viewers to identify why the professional-wrestling titan’s creative direction has gone so stagnant and you’ll hear one answer time and again: lack of competition. It’s no coincidence that the company’s late-‘90s heyday ran concurrent with the rise of Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling, which at one point…
Drone warfare is a moral grey area, and this movie is on it. Gavin Hood’s Eye in the Sky stands alongside Drones and Good Kill as the cinematic equivalent of online commenters shouting “First!” on on a hot topic but not bothering to say anything new or insightful about it…
You’ve seen a lot of movies like Too Late, and yet you haven’t. Shot over several years on 35mm, Dennis Hauck’s neo-noir detective drama is only being shown theatrically in that increasingly rarefied format — a bold financial move for an independent film at a time when so many others…
If you’ve wondered just why Hollywood now so aggressively courts Chinese viewers, look no further than The Mermaid. In just two weeks of release, Stephen Chow’s fantastical comedy has already brought in $430 million in its home country, making it China’s highest-grossing release ever. (It’s doing well here, too, having…
The centerpiece of Hail, Caesar!’s mid-century Hollywood satire is the eponymous film-within-a-film itself, an overwrought biblical epic in which a skeptical Roman centurion played by George Clooney has a literal come-to-Jesus moment. Risen, whose plot can be described in exactly the same way, never inspires one of its own. Co-writer/director…
Jane Got a Gun’s reputation precedes it, but it shouldn’t define it. After a tortured production that included the departure of original director Lynne Ramsay (Morvern Callar, We Need to Talk About Kevin) and a revolving door of leading men, the Western arrives in theaters long after popular opinion declared…
There are worse ways for a television star to transition into film than a horror movie. There are also better movies to do it in than The Boy. Still, Lauren Cohan of The Walking Dead shines bright in William Brent Bell’s dim genre exercise, a vital presence opposite a lifeless…
Call it a dissenting opinion if you must, but Dirty Grandpa has sporadic moments of hilarity: the spontaneous “USA! USA!” chant that erupts after an out-of-his-mind Zac Efron announces to spring breakers that he’s just unknowingly smoked crack, or Aubrey Plaza commanding as foreplay that Robert De Niro, as the…
Adapted from Amy-Jo Albany’s memoir about growing up with her father, Joe, the jazz pianist best known for playing with Charlie Parker, Low Down stars John Hawkes and Elle Fanning as a father-daughter duo with a lot of love and even more problems. A charming, gifted musician with a heroin…
If the Saw series taught us anything, it’s that every quasi-inventive genre movie is fated to become a yearly franchise with increasingly diminishing returns. The Purge practically cried out for this treatment from its premise alone: James DeMonaco’s film had a big idea — a near-future in which “any and…
Comedies about the battle of the sexes tend to have one clear loser: the audience. Driven by an oppositional view of romance that proved outmoded and seldom funny, Think Like a Man introduced us to six men living in Los Angeles and their corresponding flames. Some of these entanglements were…
“Chaos is order yet undeciphered” is the on-the-nose epigraph that opens Enemy, a forgivable sin in light of how gloriously enigmatic everything that follows is. Denis Villeneuve’s shared dream of a film takes the simple premise of a man glimpsing his doppelgänger while watching a movie and mines every bit…
Jillian Schlesinger’s Maidentrip condenses fourteen-year-old Laura Dekker’s quest to become the youngest person to sail solo around the world down to a breezy eighty minutes, which isn’t to say it’s all killer, no filler. Though certainly inspirational, the film could hardly be called probing: The range of emotions exhibited by…
When he died in December 2011, Kim Jong Il left behind more than a dynastic regime and a closet full of drab pantsuits. Jong Il, who ruled the hermetic North Korea from his father Kim Il Sung’s death in 1994 until his own passing seventeen years later, was a noted…
Woody Allen has been known to suggest that, in directing a good movie, much of the battle lies in casting. Were that entirely true, the Philip Seymour Hoffman-, Catherine Keener- and Christopher Walken-starring A Late Quartet would be phenomenal. As it is, the film about a New York City string…
Lisa Ohlin’s Simon and the Oaks has all the superficial elements of compelling drama but none of the interiority; it looks like a good movie without ever actually feeling like one. Try to imagine low-rent Spielberg set in Sweden: whimsical children with intertwined fates, Nazis looming on the horizon, and…
Movies about drugs and alcohol may be a dime(bag) a dozen, but James Ponsoldt’s Smashed is as much about recovery as it is about addiction, with Ponsoldt successfully making the case that the twelve steps can sometimes be more difficult than whatever necessitated them in the first place. Kate’s main…
