Everyone knew this year’s best-picture contest at the Oscars came down to two diametrically opposed choices: Moonlight, a coming-of-age tale of a young, gay black man in Miami created by Liberty City natives Tarell Alvin McCraney and Barry Jenkins, and La La Land, a big-budget Hollywood musical about how awesome Hollywood is.
It’s thematically fitting that Henry Phillips’ slight, prickling Punching Henry hits theaters just weeks after The Comedian, a bloated Robert De Niro exercise also about a difficult stand-up comic grinding through bad gigs and insulting meetings with TV suits — and accidentally starring in viral videos. The Comedian was about…
A stylized painting of Woody Allen, a golden gun to his forehead, stares down at Hannah Horvath (Lena Dunham) in the astonishing third episode of Girls’ final season. She’s seated in the study of a best-selling wunderkind novelist, planted in the middle of his sofa while he faces her, coldly,…
The one thing I know for sure is that most Oscar voters don’t care that a film as seemingly pleasant as Damien Chazelle’s modern musical La La Land has proven so divisive. Even as lyrics from “City of Stars” have become inspirational memes, artists like songwriter Elon Rutberg are calling…
If you’ve grown weary of the Don Drapers and Walter Whites of the world, don’t expect James Keziah Delaney to make a strong first impression. Taboo’s antihero, played with signature laconicism by Tom Hardy, is another difficult man for this golden age of TV — and, as fate would have…
Agnieszka Smoczynska’s The Lure is a cautionary tale of sisterhood, sexuality and the sometimes self-destructive things people do for love. The film, which won the award for best debut at the Gdynia Film Festival, is also a diabolically wicked Polish-language musical about two beautiful mermaids who climb ashore in Warsaw…
In his atmospheric debut film, Australian theater director Simon Stone whittles down The Wild Duck into a cautionary tale about welcoming home an emotional exile. While stage adaptations of Henrik Ibsen’s tragicomedy often emphasize its farcical elements, Stone sticks to tragedy in his naturalistic version, set in densely planted logging…
Don’t hold it against Martin Zandvliet’s land-mine drama that its English title is the dopiest movie-title pun since John Singleton’s Poetic Justice. That film concerned a poet named Justice; Land of Mine a land of mines. Called Under Sandet in the original Danish — roughly Under the Sand — Zandvliet’s…
Jordan Peele’s Get Out is the most trenchant studio release in years, a slow-building, often hilarious horror thriller built upon a dead-serious idea: that a black man walking alone through white suburbs is in as much danger as any slasher-flick teenager. Peele opens with that image, showing us, in a…
Last year, while preparing for the film festival Borscht Diez, Borscht Corp.’s “minister of the interior,” Lucas Leyva, asked grant applicants a simple question: Does Borscht even matter anymore? “That’s a question we’re constantly asking ourselves,” Leyva says. “Does it matter? And if it doesn’t, why are we doing it?”…
In director Amma Asante’s epic political romance A United Kingdom, David Oyelowo and Rosamund Pike star as Seretse and Ruth Khama, the interracial royal couple who stunned the world when they fought to rule the country that would become the Republic of Botswana. The story’s a wildly interesting history lesson…
Director George Mendeluk has stated that he wanted to make Bitter Harvest to bring wider attention to the Holodomor, the forced famine imposed by Joseph Stalin that killed between three and seven million ethnic Ukrainians in the early 1930s. That’s certainly a subject worthy of a film, but the question…
No, I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore is not a documentary about all the things going through your head right now, but in his directing debut, actor Macon Blair (Blue Ruin, Green Room) certainly captures something of the spirit of the times. As this stylized, deliriously violent,…
Maybe this’ll teach us not to judge a movie by its marketing campaign. Thanks to posters and trailers focused solely on its American star, Matt Damon, Zhang Yimou’s The Great Wall has been pilloried as an example of a Chinese myth being given the Hollywood white-savior treatment. In fact, the…
It was interesting, and more than a little inspiring, to watch the public outcry against the nomination of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education over the past couple of weeks — especially the online campaign in which, in response to DeVos’ ill-informed attacks on America’s supposedly failing public education system,…
Television’s smartest network drama went out last year with a slap. The Good Wife, the hour-long CBS procedural about savvy lawyers and sexy investigators, looked as if it was going to end where it began, with Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) standing by her politician husband Peter (Chris Noth) at a…
Even zombies need sensible snacks. In Sheila Hammond’s case, that means a baggie of severed fingers, which she munches like baby carrots while stalking her next victim in a parking garage, her pink “kill poncho” pulled tightly around her shoulders. In Santa Clarita Diet, the new 10-episode Netflix original series,…
Romantic comedies seem to have soured more than most movie genres. It could be due to their insistence on happy endings, or perhaps it’s the rigid structure that demands easily avoidable conflict followed by the protagonist breathlessly chasing down his or her true love just in time for the end…
In 1902, Dr. John Kellogg changed two letters in the word “sanatorium” — defined as a resting spot for disabled soldiers — and changed the world. “Sanitariums” became the health resort of choice for the wealthy and weary, instilling in the privileged a sense that they were perpetually ill, and…
George Miller’s sci-fi series began in 1979 with the low-budget, practically DIY gearhead grindhouse flick Mad Max, and it was revived in 2015 with the delirious action masterpiece Mad Max: Fury Road. All along the way, these pictures have captured something about their times that has allowed them to break…
After announcing one of the coolest events in town for February (and likely all year) — the Coral Orgy — Borscht Corp. has continued revealing the expansive Borscht Diez film festival lineup by way of email. Unsurprisingly, the Saturday and Sunday events show no sign of slowing down what filmmaker Billy Corben says is “one of the greatest film festival lineups ever.”
Legion, the much-anticipated new FX series created by Fargo showrunner Noah Hawley, wastes no time plunging us into the murky depths of its lead’s unraveling mind, from blissful youth to harrowing adulthood plagued by a failed suicide attempt. Every scene is a dense visual and sonic cornucopia. Even quiet moments…
