Just a little more than three months ago, Tom Cruise starred in a lifeless wannabe-blockbuster called The Mummy that made little use of his innate charisma (shut up, he still has some) or his star persona, turning him into an anonymous action hero. Now comes American Made, a picture that…
Let me set the record straight: Dolores Huerta created the rally cry “Si se puede,” otherwise known as “Yes we can.” If you’ve only ever seen the 2014 film Cesar Chavez — about the legendary farmworkers union president — or watched an Barack Obama campaign speech, you may have thought…
In Battle of the Sexes, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’ film rehashing the most infamous tennis match in modern history, Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) must brawl with the coed United States Tennis Association for equal pay as she comes to terms with her attraction to women and what might be…
Lording over the colonies is all bore and bother for the queen in Stephen Frears’ sumptuous yet centerless Victoria & Abdul. The film dramatizes Queen Victoria’s spirited friendship with Abdul Karim, a charming clerk from northern India who — in this telling — jolts the Empress of India from her…
Mike White’s father-and-son college-trip comedy-drama Brad’s Status is legitimately more frightening than anything in It. Quite aside from the fact that real life is always scarier than monsters from the beyond, the writer-director’s deep understanding of envy, entitlement and embarrassment has never been more nightmarishly effective. But don’t expect one…
Over the phone from his Los Angeles office, David Lynch tells me, “It was all Harry Dean. I’d do anything for Harry Dean.” The visionary director is referring to taking on an acting role in John Carroll Lynch’s directorial debut, Lucky, which stars Harry Dean Stanton, and is largely based…
Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! is so much movie that critics April Wolfe and Alan Scherstuhl have elected to sync up Pacific Rim-style to take it on. Warning: The discussion below delves right into what we might call spoilers if a movie like Mother! could be spoiled. Now let’s drift. April, Each…
The sequel to 2015’s hit Kingsman: The Secret Service won’t make you feel the urgent need to take a shower and/or throw up, like the original probably did. Believe it or not, that’s not always a good thing. Kingsman: The Golden Circle, Matthew Vaughn’s follow-up to his brutal, joyfully degenerate…
LA Weekly film critic April Wolfe is reporting for us from the Toronto International Film Festival. The documentary section of TIFF has a reputation for programming the types of films that can easily compete for audience attention with the narrative juggernauts, and this year is no different. From Agnes Varda’s wacky…
“I think I’m very black, very cool and very dope — those three things. If I had niche or had to choose one, it’d be cool, black and awesome — and fun.” That’s how Amir George, a Chicago filmmaker, describes his own Afrofuturist alternative film work, though he admits a lot of it is really dead serious, if portrayed in a playful way.
There’s no delicate way to say this, so I’ll just spit it out. I spent the first 10 minutes of Stronger, David Gordon Green’s eventually potent drama of trauma and recovery, trying to work out whether star Jake Gyllenhaal was intending to suggest that the real-life Bostonian at the story’s…
LA Weekly film critic April Wolfe is reporting for us from the Toronto International Film Festival. Writer-director Dee Rees is breaking all the rules with her third feature, Mudbound. In film school, they tell you, “No voiceovers,” yet this film about two WWII and post-war Mississippi families — one black, one…
L.A. Weekly film critic April Wolfe is reporting for us from the Toronto International Film Festival. Filmmaking is not a poor man’s game. Even as digital cameras get cheaper, making a festival-worthy film still requires dough to get off the ground, which means the folks who tell stories through cinema…
Top of the Lake: China Girl airs on SundanceTV Jane Campion’s initial plan for Top of the Lake, her SundanceTV drama about sexual violence in a rural New Zealand town, was for the story of haunted detective Robin Griffin (Elisabeth Moss) to come to a full stop at the end…
April Wolfe is reporting for us from the Toronto International Film Festival. Dictators are a certain kind of selfish, insecure insanity made manifest, and if you’re going to study them, Joseph Stalin is a good place to start. “Stalin” wasn’t even his real name. When he was 30, he changed…
April Wolfe is reporting for us from the Toronto International Film Festival. I’d gone into the theater knowing nothing of the Chloe Zhao’s The Rider except that my colleague Bilge Ebiri adored it — and that I’d get to to witness some breathtaking cinematography capturing the dusky pastels streaking the…
Strong Island premieres on Netflix on Sept. 15 The tragic truth remains that all it takes in America for a white person to get away with killing a black person is for the white person to convince the right people — a judge, a jury, a prosecutor — of his…
First They Killed My Father premieres on Netflix on Sept. 15 It would have been easy for Angelina Jolie’s adaptation of Cambodian genocide survivor Loung Ung’s 2000 memoir to go ruthlessly and repeatedly for the emotional jugular. First They Killed My Father is, after all, the story of a young…
The Telluride Horror Show, one of the premier horror movie gatherings, is just a month away. And a trip to the mountains is in order for those who enjoy creature features. The festival just released its first slate of offerings, including full length movies and both live-action and animated shorts, and, just watching the trailers of some of these flicks has terrified us.
In Eliza Hittman’s debut feature, It Felt Like Love, a young girl tests the waters of adult sexuality, offering her body up to the statuesque bros who live in her Eastern Seaboard beach town. She tries her hardest to mimic the women in pornos, the ones all the boys want,…
Is there a more telling symptom of the sickness afflicting studio filmmaking right now than the fact that there aren’t more good Reese Witherspoon comedies out there? In eras past, a hit could be built more years than not around a star like her. Sunny yet tart, she’s a romantic…
It floats in the darkness, unspooling onscreen with a sepulchral glow. It has waited for what seems like an eternity to meet the eyes of its audience, and it senses in them both anticipation and dread. Yes, there was that bizarre miniseries back in 1990 (God, remember Tim Curry in…
