In this age of billion-dollar, candy-colored, fully digital child-distraction movie-making, the new chatty-animal adventure comedy Storks wouldn’t have to be good in any way to be wildly profitable. It often is good, though, hilariously so, its too-familiar misfits-become-a-family storyline enlivened by flights of lavish comic invention. Its set pieces, especially…
A woman wears sunglasses, a tight red dress, matching long gloves and red lipstick. She stands and smokes a cigarette, ostensibly watching a rugby game, but really the players are watching her, fumbling their footwork, and it’s exactly the effect she desires. This early scene, with its shifting gazes and…
Pasolini’s Salò meets red Solo cups in Goat, Andrew Neel’s deep, dank dive into the depravities of frat pledging that operates as its own kind of hazing ritual. Points are made and lessons imparted with all the subtlety and finesse of a Greek paddle to the head. Based on Brad…
It’s hard to watch White Girl without experiencing a creeping sense of anxiety. Loosely based on the adolescent life of writer/director Elizabeth Wood, the film follows Leah (Morgan Saylor), a college student who parties all night and snorts prodigious amounts of cocaine. She and her roommate, Katie (India Menuez), live…
Look, if you’re not stirred by the sight of Denzel Washington, clad in head-to-toe black, riding a black stallion over dunes and bluffs and right up to the saloon of some two-bit frontier town — well, then maybe the movies just aren’t for you. Washington, of course, strides right into…
What has the power to register voters (and possibly bring about world peace)? Tacos, of course. Playing off a Donald Trump surrogate’s famous “taco trucks on every corner” quote, in which the co-founder of Latinos for Trump suggested that leaving immigration unsolved would lead to – gasp! – a taco truck on…
Discount advance ticket packages are now on sale for the 39th Denver Film Festival, offering select blocks of tickets for the festival that will run from November 2 through November 13. And the Denver Film Society, which has produced the festival since its start forty years ago, has revamped its…
Filming started this past Monday on Our Souls at Night, the fourth film in which Robert Redford and Jane Fonda co-star. The others are 1966’s The Chase, 1967’s Barefoot in the Park and 1979’s The Electric Horseman — but one reader thought there was one more. Says Maddy: You forgot…
Over the last 10 days, the Toronto International Film Festival has screened hundreds of movies from all across the world. LA Weekly’s April Wolfe and Michael Nordine trekked to Canada in search of the best of the fest, from the Cannes holdovers and awards hopefuls to the world premieres and…
It was a wild week in film releases. We reviewed John Krasinski’s Sundance favorite (which won’t break the dysfunctional family arc), found the final installment in the Bridget Jones saga, Bridget Jones’s Baby, to be a pleasant surprise, and an got spooked with an eerie Polish possession in Demon. Here are the eight best…
We’ve come a long way since American Psycho. And also not. When co-writer/director Mary Harron premiered her Bret Easton Ellis adaptation in 2000, the kneejerk assumption for audiences who’d only seen the trailer was that surely a man had made the ultra-bloody black comedy. The film was dismissed before it…
Looking back at this dismal summer of superhero adaptations, I am reminded of something Chris Rock said during the 77th Academy Awards: “There are only four real stars, and the rest are just popular people.” This was February 2005, mind you — a few months before Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins…
At first glance, TV (The Book), which came out last week, may look like a survey of what two respected TV critics consider to be the greatest television shows of all time. But, really, it’s a book about friendship. The joint authors of this tome, Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller…
Better Things’ creators seem to anticipate that you’ll judge Sam Fox’s parenting – and they make you pay for it. In the first scene, Sam (Pamela Adlon) scrolls through her phone on a mall bench while her youngest daughter, Duke (Olivia Edward), cries and pulls on her arm. It’s one…
To show all that he can do, to show something of what life’s actually like, Donald Glover first has to break your heart. Glover – the star, creator, and often writer of FX’s tense, downwardly mobile hangout comedy Atlanta – is best known, still, as a handsome clown on NBC’s Community, Dan…
In lieu of a traditional title card, Indivisible offers a corker of an opening sequence that begins with three young women walking home from the beach like hungover soldiers in soft morning light until a blue panel van displays the original Italian title: Indivisibili. In between, that trio of up-all-night…
Writer/director Osgood Perkins has been peeking at my Shirley Jackson book collection, and he’s already read through my favorites: The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. His sophomore feature, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, is a magical amalgam of…
The Hollars tells the familiar tale of a dysfunctional family pulled together by unfortunate circumstances. John Hollar (John Krasinski, who also directed) is a frustrated graphic novelist with a pregnant girlfriend, Rebecca (Anna Kendrick). When he gets the news that his mother, Sally (Margo Martindale), has a brain tumor, he…
Bridget Jones mines the riches of embarrassment. Her gaffes, blunders, stumbles and pratfalls provide the laughs in the atypical romcoms built around her, films that rely heavily on the comedy of idiosyncrasy. Bridget is no outsider: She’s a straight, white, middle class, university-educated woman with a London apartment, a media…
Matt Johnson’s prankish Operation Avalanche boasts a strong half hour of footage that’s fully engaged with this question: Could a couple of bright, Kubrick-obsessed A.V. geeks have faked the moon landing in 1969? Like the best speculative fiction, these scenes concern the practicalities. We see the gang’s hidden-camera peek at…
Still and silent, Jerry Lewis slumps there like old furniture in the lifeless house in which the first half of Daniel Noah’s coming-of-old-age drama Max Rose molders. The film is a fiction, a tidy and improbable one, but these scenes have documentary power. Lewis’ Max Rose, recently bereaved, sits and…
Horror has in recent years been so informed by found footage, smartphones and Skype that a trend toward folklore was probably inevitable. Far from trying to capture the moment, arthouse movies like The Babadook, It Follows and now Demon aspire to a kind of timelessness — what was old has…
