In the world of Difficult People, the cutting comedy returning this week to Hulu, the game is rigged against Julie (Julie Klausner) and Billy (Billy Eichner), but perhaps only because they rigged it against themselves. As their friends find success, the two struggling comedians feign interest in jobs that pay…
Here’s a story you might have missed a few weeks back, what with the country collapsing. In late June, at Dallas’ Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center, 30 aspirational souls received burn treatment after walking over hot coals at a Tony Robbins seminar. Robbins, a seize-your-life salesman of granite physique and…
If there’s a war movie we haven’t seen enough of yet, it’s one from the female perspective, one that further obscures who the good guys and bad guys really are. In Anne Fontaine’s moody feature The Innocents, even the nuns are gray. During a bitterly cold winter, tucked away in…
Here’s some good news: Netflix is now streaming Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. No other TV show is quite so ambitious or politically deft as star and executive producer Rachel Bloom’s (and co-creator Aline Brosh McKenna’s) darkly comic, whip-smart send-up of romantic comedies. The title alone has turned more than one of my…
Is it possible to sustain a feature in a single interior location with the premise that three outlaws on the run may or may not rape the three women of the house, two of whom are already being molested by their father? I mean, you could. But why the hell…
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:…
Don’t let the publicity photos of the ensemble cast clad in ’70s-era tuxes and flower-child dresses, or even the cloying Mumford-mimicking soundtrack on the trailer, fool you: Captain Fantastic ain’t some twee, cutesy Wes Anderson romp or a Little Miss Sunshine knockoff. This dramedy marking the feature debut of longtime…
Kindly allow this lengthy aside and conspiracy theorizing: I can’t start my review of Paul Feig’s redo of Ghostbusters without first mentioning the stupefying chaos that attended last Thursday evening’s press screening, the only one of two scheduled a half-hour apart in New York before the movie’s opening. This unprecedented…
Alex Gibney will be ready if the power grids fail. “We have a place in Maine now,” the director says. “We just installed solar panels. We can fish. We have water. With a little bit of Sterno, we’ll probably be OK.” After a long career dredging up the dark side…
James DeMonaco’s Purge series, about a near future in which all crime is legal for one annual 12-hour period, began as a disturbing setup for basic genre thrills: 2013’s franchise-starter was essentially a home-invasion thriller with a dystopian twist. By the time Purge: Anarchy rolled around a year later, the…
A wiener dog is the perfect mascot for Todd Solondz’s films. Dachshunds are ridiculous, funny without trying, but that zero-dignity waddle belies a much fiercer purpose: to hunt and kill small prey. Solondz’s body of work, stretching from coming-of-age cringefest Welcome to the Dollhouse to his newest, Wiener-Dog, has the…
Stanley Kubrick once sent his friend John le Carré a letter about why he couldn’t adapt one of the author’s books. “Essentially,” he wrote, “how do you tell a story it took the author 165,000 (my guess) good and necessary words to tell, with 12,000 words (about the number of…
In one of many throwaway gags in The Secret Life of Pets, a group of dogs gathering for an all-important rescue operation is momentarily sidetracked by a butterfly, which sends them into a riot of leaping and yelping. Pets are easily distracted, you see. And you know who else is…
Sometimes a movie seems like it was more fun to make than it is to watch. Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates is one of those movies. Zac Efron and Adam DeVine are Dave and Mike Stangle, two troublemaking brothers with a knack for walking the tightrope of party-makers/breakers. With…
With the release of Warcraft last month, not only is the circa 2004 game getting a boost, but so is the story of World of Warcraft’s most famous player, Leeroy Jenkins, who rushed into battle in a move immortalized in the 2005 video “A Rough Go.” Two years later, Joel Warner…
The Emmy award-winning Colorado Inside Out is offering another blast from the past at 8 p.m. tonight on Colorado Public Television with “Time Machine Special: Circa 1876.” Colorado became a state in 1876, the same year the nation celebrated its centennial — which explains this state’s nickname. It’s a little…
Sure, July is all about fireworks and celebrating the launch of the American endeavor, but when it’s time to take a break from all the backyard pyrotechnics and flag waving, you’ll be happy to find a month well stocked with geek fun. From the greatest fan film ever made to…
Hot dogs, hamburgers, fireworks and heat will always stamp our memories of summer, but it may be those moments we spend inside the refuge of our favorite movie theaters — scientifically cooled by refrigeration — that leave our minds and imaginations racing like a kid headed toward a water slide…
The Alamo Drafthouse is flying high this summer, with a new partnership with Denver International Airport calling for Alamo to produce a free, four-film-series this year, Film on the Fly, which will show off the new open-air plaza that connects the iconic Jeppesen Terminal with the Westin Denver International Airport. The series…
If your city’s power grid shuts down this summer, it may be a brownout, or it may be an act of cyber-warfare — a straight-out-of-Hollywood scenario that suddenly seems scarily possible thanks to the labyrinthine story director Alex Gibney tells in his riveting documentary Zero Days. It’s complicated, but know…
Octave Mirbeau’s The Diary of a Chambermaid, a 1900 novel about the depravities in all social strata written from the point of view of a servant named Célestine, has famously been adapted twice before, by two of cinema’s immortals. Benoît Jacquot’s uneven take on the material won’t challenge the stature…
In a stark white room, four boys huddle on a mattress, addressing the camera. They’re athletic, the picture of youth and every Abercrombie & Fitch catalog. A blond boy says, “We want to thank Jane O’Brien Media for this opportunity,” and they all smile and wave. They’re about to take…
