Film, TV & Streaming

Shirley MacLaine has been described by press and co-stars over the years as “rude,” “nasty,” “difficult” and “selfish.” Hell, she’s called herself impatient, caustic and much worse. None of that has stopped her from being a fiery mainstay in American screwball comedies and dramas. Her signature pixie cut came to…

Almost no one ever asks young women what they desire — in movies or reality. Feminine cravings are still seen as a dire threat, a grand disturbance to the power structure, and the few movie men who dare speak the words “What do you want?” — like Noah in The…

In 1976’s The Devil Finds Work, James Baldwin makes a crucial verb distinction when discussing the screen legends, like Bette Davis, with whom he was transfixed (sometimes uneasily so) in his youth: “One does not go to see them act: one goes to watch them be.” When one goes to…

To understand how Ritesh Batra’s The Sense of an Ending might disappoint you if you’ve read the suspenseful, tear-jerking Julian Barnes novel on which it’s based, you should think back to Batra’s much-lauded debut feature The Lunchbox (2013). In that humanistic film, a young woman trapped in her marriage falls…

Somehow, MTV2, the channel that was launched 21 years ago to show all the music videos MTV wasn’t, has essentially turned into BET — or TV One or Centric or whatever black programming-filled channel you know about. The evidence is all there — before it jumped back to its original…

There’s more of a narrative in Song to Song than in Terrence Malick’s last two films, but that may not, at first, seem like a good thing. Pin Malick’s work down these days — tease a story or philosophy out of it – and you’re usually faced with something simple,…

Consider, before you consider anything else about the sequel to Trainspotting, that the director of both films is an artist whose signal trait had been a seeming repulsion at the thought of ever going back to the well. Between the original and the new T2 (cheeky title, innit), Danny Boyle…

It’s the take as old as time. Yes, Beauty and the Beast’s love story can be read as a tale of abuse and brainwashing, of a woman imprisoned by a tyrant until she starts chatting with the table settings — and then, as seasons pass, chastising herself in song for…

Pop quiz. What comic-book adaptation centers on a white man orphaned by tragedy but blessed with great wealth who travels to an Asian country, only to return to America as a fearsome hero of amazing skill? That’s a trick question, of course: There are too many to count. In Batman…

With movie-history viewing choices spawning like mold in a damp room, we can easily see the things we didn’t even know we’d never seen. For me that includes Takashi Miike’s Black Society Trilogy (Arrow Video), a trio of quick, down-and-dirty crime-gang pulp rockets (1995-99) that established Miike as Japan’s fin-de-siècle…

In recent months, there have been serious calls for liberal city dwellers to reach beyond their “bubble” to better understand their rural counterparts. What’s rarely brought into the conversation: that large swathes of the so-called liberal elite have roots in rural places. These people, myself included, came of age among…

Gentle, humane, embracing a full range from slapstick to tragedy, Marcel Pagnol’s trilogy about the people of the Marseille waterfront has bewitched audiences for decades. Multiple remakes, including a Broadway musical, Hollywood condensations by James Whale in 1938 and Joshua Logan in 1961 and a recent “reboot” from French actor…

Let’s say you had to make up a list of historical moments that might serve as grand backdrops for sweeping, old-fashioned, Hollywood-style romantic dramas. How high would you rank the Armenian Genocide? How high would you rank any genocide? Watching Hotel Rwanda, you probably never hoped that, amid the carnage,…