Arts & Culture

If you think summer movies are clamorous, try a current Broadway musical. Watching Jersey Boys on stage is like soldiering through some extreme eating contest where you’re force-fed dessert for three hours. It’s all falsetto heroics and hustled-through character drama, every beat of every scene over-scored, over-rehearsed, and overbearing. And…

For all of Fox News’s fear-mongering about Hollywood being out to indoctrinate us with liberal values, when it comes to pregnancy, the movies have for years been curiously conservative. If a woman gets knocked up, she either loses the baby by accident or carries it to term. Abortion, an option…

In 2012, advocates for marijuana legalization pushed Initiative 502 onto the ballot in Washington state. This year, director Riley Morton released the documentary Evergreen: The Road to Legalization, which chronicles the months leading up to the vote. In interviews with recreational and medical marijuana users, dealers and legislators, as well…

Chris Richter. Back in March, gallery director Bobbi Walker realized that her planned June slot had come apart and that she needed to come up with somebody fast. At the time, she was checking out the scene in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and came across the work of painter Chris…

“Wherever you live in this world, basically…you are alone. Even if have support systems, we’re really alone.” Those words, shorn of sentimentality, are offered—and received—as motherly balm in the documentary When I Walk. Filmmaker Jason DaSilva, having turned his camera on himself to capture the ravaging effects of multiple sclerosis…

Ravenous is a film-shaped UFO: It’s so delightfully weird that its very existence defies logic. Imagine a film that makes A Modest Proposal–style satire out of Dracula’s gothic horror tropes in the spaghetti western milieu of The Great Silence. It’s a pitch-black comedy about Manifest Destiny and cannibal frontiersmen. Set…

The Rover, Australian filmmaker David Michôd’s followup to the brutish family drama Animal Kingdom, is a post-apocalyptic Western from the Outback, a stretch of land that already looks like the world’s been blown away. All Michôd needs to convince us of the devastation is a title card pegging the events…

Recently, Star Wars fans, along with much of the planet’s pop-culture collective, nearly ruptured the internet in their enthusiasm to share set-building photos from next year’s long-awaited new feature film. But these weren’t shots of just any set. They depicted the construction of the Millennium Falcon. You’ve never heard of…