Prodigies flame out; it happens all the time. But the tale of Sergei Polunin, a young Ukrainian ballet dancer whose family hitched its wagon to his star, is a particularly sad one. Steven Cantor’s doc Dancer illuminates Polunin’s celebrity before it reveals his artistry; much of the film is a…
The conventional wisdom about early-career Tim Burton is that he was an imaginative visual stylist but not a great storyteller. That sounds smart, right? It’s still something that a certain kind of ratty-beard-stroking film critic keeps tucked in his sweater vest in case he needs to say something that sounds…
Deepwater Horizon is the most entertaining Hollywood disaster movie in years. I’m sorry — is that a terrible thing to say? Peter Berg’s film is based on the true story of the BP-leased, Transocean-owned deepwater drilling rig that in 2010 exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 souls and…
Mira Nair’s Queen of Katwe is a true-life tale transformed into an inspirational fable. That’s not novel for the movies, but in this director’s hands, the results are mostly enchanting. The film follows Phiona Mutesi (Madina Nalwanga), an impoverished Ugandan girl who became a chess champion at the age of…
The first moments of Luke Cage offer much that the previous 38 or so hours of Marvel superhero Netflix drama haven’t: laughter. Warmth. A sense that the New York City that Daredevil and Jessica Jones mope and brawl through might be more than just a place to save — it…
One of the benefits of services like Netflix and Amazon Prime is that they allow TV stars, liberated from the confines of network television and cable, to try something new, expand their reach or otherwise kick it up a notch. In Amazon’s Eat the World, for example, Emeril Lagasse, the…
America might not be ready for Fleabag, the new Amazon/BBC series from British writer and creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Think about all the guff Girls received for “forcing” viewers along on a ride with myopic 20-somethings. Waller-Bridge has gone even further than Girls creator Lena Dunham, speaking directly to the camera…
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…
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…
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…
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…
A decade after the fact, the scandal of JT LeRoy — the HIV-positive, young male (though gender-fluid) writer adored by scores of global alt celebrities who was revealed to be the creation of a woman named Laura Albert — is relitigated in Jeff Feuerzeig’s queasily absorbing documentary Author: The JT…
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…
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…
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…
Miami is known for many things: beaches, babes, and booze. But fashion? Not so much. One local filmmaker aims to change that. Retro Couture, a documentary short by Christopher Rapalo, unveils Miami’s tangled history as one of the nation’s leading clothing manufacturing meccas, and follows its journey to reviving its…
“They should have sent a poet,” says Jodie Foster’s teary-eyed astronaut as she gazes upon the glory of space in Contact. It took nearly 20 years, but Terrence Malick has taken it upon himself to answer that call with Voyage of Time. Not every line rhymes, and some privilege sound…
Here’s a gorgeous and audacious slice of East Bay life that’s dreamily attentive to Northern California sun and concrete, to the shambled beauty of a street couch under a BART station, to the slow thump of cruising stoned with hip hop bumping, to the way suburb-city edges into city-city and…
Our critic April Wolfe is filing updates all week from the Toronto International Film Festival. Writer/director Ivan I. Tverdovsky may be a twentysomething male, but in his sophomore feature, he exhibits a direct pipeline into the psyche of a lonely, middle-aged woman. In Zoology, a lowly zoo worker suddenly sprouts…
As October approaches and cinephiles are craving fresh films from the festival circuit, Miami Film Festival is handing us exactly what we need when we need it. In an announcement today at the Wynwood location of the festival’s official timekeeper, Shinola, Miami Film Festival revealed its lineup for GEMS, the…
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…
