Syfy’s Incorporated Compellingly Links the End-Times to Now

Incorporated comes on like the kind of TV show you think you have to pay close attention to. There’s more consideration of climate change in the tense Syfy dystopian thriller than in all four-and-a-half hours of this fall’s presidential debates. As the series opens, stern white titles on a black…

Your December TV Watch List: The Six Shows We’re Counting On

It’s December, which means it’s time to curl up in front of the TV in a fetal position and pray for 2017. Since this year has been Satan’s masturbatory fantasy, we deserve to glue our eyelids open and soak in the sweet, sweet escapism. And on January 1st, fortified by…

Isabelle Huppert Faces the Worst in the Curiously Beautiful Things to Come

One reason why Isabelle Huppert makes suffering so compelling onscreen is her sheer … well, “unflappability” isn’t quite the right word. It’s a kind of ironic distance, perhaps: The actress can convey curiosity, bewilderment and coolness all at once, even as she deals with the most agonizing of circumstances. But…

Evolution Is a Science-Fiction Marvel That Flips the Usual Gender Codes

Watching Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s mesmerizing sci-fi arthouse stunner, Evolution, I thought of the paintings of surrealist Rene Magritte — a few in particular: The Collective Invention (1934) and The Human Condition diptych (1933, 1935). The former features a creature — the bottom limbs of a woman and the body of a…

Jillian Mayer’s I Am Your Grandma Turns 5 With an Art Basel Miami Beach Premiere

It’s been five years since multimedia artist/filmmaker Jillian Mayer went viral with the 63-second short film I Am Your Grandma. The video has screened at many respectable film festivals and exhibited at scores of notable art galleries. It will finally make its official Art Basel Miami Beach premiere during the annual fair’s 2016 outdoor short-films program, Best Dressed Chicken in Town.

Playing by Old Rules, Warren Beatty’s Howard Hughes Drama Stumbles

When last we saw Howard Hughes onscreen, Leonardo DiCaprio was repeating “the way of the future” ad infinitum as he gazed into the mirror. Warren Beatty’s long-in-the-making Rules Don’t Apply isn’t nearly as concerned with the future as Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator was, looking instead to the past and all…

Kathy Bates Bestrides Bad Santa 2 and the American Turdscape

Oh man, are we in a backlash on liberal, PC culture right now. I mean, if you can call electing the KKK’s and Nazi party’s greatest white hope to the highest office in the world a backlash. I can’t even count how many people — strangers, family, trolls — have…

Muggling Along: Fantastic Beasts Conjures Too Little of the Potter Magic

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, written as an original screenplay by author J.K. Rowling, is an expansion of her Harry Potter universe, and a test: Without lovable, adolescent leads Harry, Hermione Grainger, and Ron Weasley, or the elaborate narrative backbone provided by Rowling’s novels, can the wizarding world…