Showbiz Drama Beyond the Lights Is Familiar but Cutting

Tales of fame and its trappings — and the way they’re never enough to build a life — are as old as show business itself. Maybe for that reason, almost any story about discovering the hollowness of fame is often written off as a cliché. But what’s the difference, really,…

Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar Is Grand, but It Doesn’t Connect

There’s so much space in Christopher Nolan’s nearly three-hour intergalactic extravaganza Interstellar that there’s almost no room for people. This is gigantosaurus movie entertainment, set partly in outer space and partly in a futuristic dustbowl America where humans are in danger of dying out, and Nolan — who cowrote the…

Michael Keaton Is Grand in the Flashy Birdman

Before there was a Birdman, there was a Batman — several, in fact — though the best was played by Michael Keaton in the two Tim Burton films in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Since then, Christian Bale’s somber strutting and muttering, as seen in Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies,…

Whiplash Offers a Painful and Joyous Jazz Education

Jazz isn’t dead. Miraculously, there’s always a small but steady stream of young people who continue to fall in love with this most dazzling and elusive American genre, spending hours, days, and months running ribbons of scales and memorizing Charlie Parker solos in the hopes that some of the alto…

Campus Comedy Dear White People Braves Tough Questions of Race

Among its many attributes, Justin Simien’s exuberant debut feature, Dear White People, proves we’re not yet living in a “postracial America”: Forget for a moment there are so many vexing problems entwining race, class, and economics that we haven’t been able to put a Band-Aid on, let alone solve. In…

Andre Benjamin Is Hendrix, but the Women Make Jimi

Groupie has come to be an ugly word, a misogynist dig that’s used all too casually by men and women alike. A groupie is a woman who doesn’t “do” anything; she gets all of her glamour via her association with a strong man, most often a rock star. How can…

Gone Girl Is Smartly Crafted, Well Acted, and a Bit Too Slick

Everything about Gone Girl, David Fincher’s adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s enormously popular 2012 thriller about a deteriorating marriage and a wife gone missing, is precise and thoughtful — it’s as well planned as the perfect murder, with its share of vicious, shivery delights. But at the end of the perfect…

It’s Business as Usual for The Trip Stars, and That’s Fine

For women especially, it’s wholly out of fashion to have sympathy for middle-aged white men. In both real life and fiction, the thinking goes, they’ve reigned supreme long enough. Who cares about their anxiety over their receding hairlines, their poochy stomachs, their inability to attract young babes? That tinny plink…

Zombie Comedy Life After Beth Is a Bit Too Stiff

Every other year or so, someone comes down the indie-movie pike with an idea for an unconventional zombie movie — as opposed to the workaday ones, where the dead simply return to life and chew on limbs and stuff. Life After Beth, the debut film from writer-director Jeff Baena, strives…