By coming on so strong, so fevered, Bryan achieves the dubious feat of making his host of documented facts, reasonable inferences and alarming subjects for further research all seem seem less persuasive than if they had been presented more soberly
Its unruly scenes emerge out of disorder, out of chants and shrieks and fractured images, and always threaten to fade back into abstraction
Spastic and impressionistic, Random Acts of Flyness is the free jazz of television, a searing collage of black life in America with a rhythm all its own
Like many Gothic tales, The Little Stranger hangs tantalizingly between genres: It has elements of haunted house thriller, of doomed romance, of psychological thriller, of historical allegory
This is a story of stifling manners and oppressive codes of conduct, where the wealthy “villains” wear a strained smile and an icky sheen of privilege
Most of Nico, 1988 takes place two years before its subject’s death, in 1986, when a now raven-haired Nico (played with an inquisitive weariness by the excellent Dyrholm) tours Europe with a band of amateur musicians desperate for gigs
… I imagined how whatever scene I was watching might have been staged and shot and acted out in a more traditional film — and I was inevitably disappointed by what has been lost …
Peretz could have given each potential pairing equal time in the story, but he sticks with the most evocative of the two; Juliet, Naked has its charms, and they are named Rose Byrne and Ethan Hawke
Army has lost it all and has only himself to blame in this barroom comedy, made by first-time filmmaker Dennis Hefter.
At its best, the show was a canny deconstruction of contemporary late-night comedy, which has been swamped with political satire since Stewart, the former Daily Show host, turned Bush-era liberal outrage comedy into its very own TV genre
Happytime Murders, though, demands that we take its world somewhat seriously, that we invest ourselves in the tensions between people and puppets, that we buy into its by-the-book serial-killer narrative …
Shot with a crew of four on 16 mm, the film is a gritty, stripped-down character piece, featuring Loden herself as Wanda and Michael Higgins as the thief, Mr. Dennis, alongside a cast of expressive and peculiar non-actors
Bujalski frames most of Support the Girls as an almost real-time delineation of chaos, but his storytelling elegance — delicate, nearly invisible foreshadowing; cogent evocations of backstory — adds reflective layers to the surface anarchy
The film’s wrenching centerpiece is the 2014 death of Eric Garner, killed due to “compression of neck, compression of chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police” who suspected him of selling loose cigarettes
Secrets get exposed, cultural barriers get smashed and re-erected, and every apparent villain will prove heroic and every hero something of a villain
This new version, directed by Danish filmmaker Michael Noer, brings to the story a refreshing intensity and sweep, and even a sense of adventure
Scandal ensues when the charming Nick Young (Henry Golding), secretly heir to a wealthy Chinese-Singaporean real estate fortune, brings his accomplished, lower-class Chinese-American girlfriend, Rachel Chu (Fresh Off The Boat’s Constance Wu), home for his best friend’s wedding
After receiving a 1,000-piece jigsaw as a gift at that party, Agnes discovers a surprise talent and passion: She can put one together in just a chunk of an afternoon
Though Moselle’s narrative feature debut, Skate Kitchen, tells a fictional story, the director again draws heavily from her subjects’ own personal histories, this time constructing a story about teen girls finding themselves and each other at the local skate park
Through the stories of how these teens ended up at God’s Promise, Cameron Post suggests the rigid hegemony of American life, the all-too-common story of religious belief perverted in the service of fitting in
The plot concerns skinny dreamer Davey, a fanatic for the Bigfoot creatures and aliens of supermarket tabloids, suddenly convinced that the loner cop (Rich Sommer) who lives across the street must be a serial killer responsible for a spate of missing kids
An assemblage of TV clips sets the stage: Ninety percent of all children have died within the space of a month, with the survivors gaining a variety of superpowers that the government catalogs in a color-coded chart ripped right from the Bush administration
