A question is posed to the main character of Barry Jenkins’ wondrous, superbly acted new film, Moonlight: “Who is you, man?” The beauty of Jenkins’ second feature, which follows his San Francisco–set black-boho romance Medicine for Melancholy (2008), radiates from the way that query is explored and answered: with specifics…
America never understood Oasis’ hugeness. By that I don’t just mean the band’s epochal mid-’90s global popularity or the nationalistic fervor it stirred in the U.K. I mean, simply, its hugeness of sound. In the States, only the ballads connected, the glorious/meaningless Beatle raptures “Wonderwall,” “Live Forever” and “Champagne Supernova”…
An archeologist, a North Korean dictator, a Norse god, two photographers, the people of Indonesia and a tribal chief who believes Jesus is actually black American WWII soldier John Frum all look into a volcano and see their fates. That’s not the beginning of a joke; it’s the premise of…
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. Jackson, who penned chilling ghost stories and moral tales in the ‘40s, ’50s and ’60s — like her…
Before we get into the matter of Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, we must first address the issue of the man actually playing Jack Reacher. Resolved: Tom Cruise has absolutely nothing in common physically with author Lee Child’s crime-solving ex-military drifter.
It’s rare for a franchise, especially in the horror genre, to actually get better as it progresses — doubly so if the final part of said progression is a TV series. Yet in six-part miniseries form, currently airing on the you-didn’t-know-you-had-it Pop network following a broadcast in Australia earlier this…
Between The Night Manager, Veep and now Chance, a new Hulu series adapted from a nasty Kem Nunn novel, Hugh Laurie has had an exceptional year in television. The Hulu program stands out slightly above the rest, considering its resonant dialogue with the Oxford-born Laurie’s most famous role. Like House,…
If any city deserves the Ryan Murphy treatment, it’s Miami. The screenwriter, director, and producer behind Glee and American Horror Story has a fetish for camp, crime, and color. So it’s no wonder that American Crime Story, the Murphy-led TV series that recounted the O.J. Simpson murder investigation and trial…
In André Téchiné’s vibrant new film Being 17, two teens wrestle with desire and hostility in a mountainous corner of France. The subject matter is not new for Téchiné, who has for more than 40 years explored sexual self-awakening, alienation and family strife in films notable for their consistency and…
If I have to hear Ti West’s movies called “slow burns” one more time, I might set my laptop on fire right quick. West’s breakthrough hit, The House of the Devil, was a leisurely paced throwback to early ’80s Satanic panic — before the slasher, with plenty of obvious jump…
“How could a big man like you fuck up like this?” That’s the question that Nathan Zuckerman fears being asked — in Philip Roth’s Pulitzer-winning American Pastoral (1997) — if he were to show the book he’s written about the tragic life of his old Newark classmate Seymour “Swede” Levov…
“These are the images that have marked me and leave me wondering still.” That’s how Kirsten Johnson prefaces Cameraperson, made up of footage she has collected over 25 years of working as a camera operator, cinematographer and director on dozens of different documentaries — films like Laura Poitras’ The Oath…
Adults in 2016 know not to feed the trolls. If you have to, though, you need to come on hard and strong, publicly glutting them on so much truth that they just curl up and die under their bridges/in their comment threads. So it goes in Mick Jackson’s patient, heartening…
Half a century after its debut, The Battle of Algiers has a permanent parking spot in the film canon. After taking home the Golden Lion at the 1966 Venice Film Festival, it was nominated for three Academy Awards (one in 1967 and two in 1969, oddly) and now ranks within…
A young man tramples through the snow in fast, furious, headlong motion in the beginning of André Téchiné’s Being 17, a film that proceeds at a similar clip. So have many of the director’s previous works: Téchiné, who began making movies five decades ago and remains the best-known of France’s…
Have there ever been entertainment-media product tie-ins like the Ouija movies? The shriekingly enjoyable Ouija: Origin of Evil, like its less successful 2014 predecessor Ouija, lays out as its best case that the toy it’s advertising will destroy your life, maybe kill your family and damn your very soul. 30…
Even those of us with a soft spot for dumb, high-concept Hollywood comedies might be outraged by the limp, unfunny nothingburger that is Keeping Up with the Joneses. A wan attempt to mix the comedy of domestic anxiety with the comedy of inept espionage — think Neighbors meets Central Intelligence…
Outside of dudes killing dudes, there’s little the moviegoers seem to love more than weddings, a truth that Elite Zexer’s heartsick desert drama Sand Storm exploits for a first-act sucker punch. The nuptials that teen Layla (Lamis Ammar) is driving her father Suliman (Hitham Omari) toward, the frame of a…
Season three of Amazon’s Transparent has few of the cratering events that have marked our time with the Pfeffermans up to this point, but it continues to reward thinking viewers as it considers issues of gender and identity, the intersection of theory and reality, the lingering impact of sexual abuse…
“Shit’s getting ugly in the RuPaul Drag Race.” —Janae, Orange Is the New Black RuPaul’s All Stars 2 has been perhaps the greatest season of the only reality-TV competition that matters. Logo TV’s Emmy-winning series is not only a mainstream ingress into a historically devalued, antinormative art form for an…
If it seems like there’s a lot to be excited about within Miami Film Festival’s 13-film lineup for its Gems series, it’s because there is. The October installment of the festival, taking place between October 13 and 16, is meant to just give a taste of what’s to come for…
It was only a few years ago that filmmaker Celia Rowlson-Hall was living in Miami and working on her short film, Si Nos Dejan, commissioned by Borscht Corp. Now, she’s coming back to the city as part of the Borscht 9.5 mini-festival with her debut feature film, Ma, for a…
