Alia Shawkat’s great comic skill is for the continually fresh expression of a determined disgust. That eager face of hers, beneath its constellations of freckles and her great Harpo-frizzed curls, is forever souring up with disappointment, even as her characters strive not to let this on. To feel let down…
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…
As Allied opens, Brad Pitt parachutes so gently and quietly onto a stretch of Moroccan desert that at first you think he might be dead. And maybe he sort of is — maybe he has to be. Pitt’s Max Vatan is a pinched, terse figure in the first act of…
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…
Maybe it was the agitated, election-induced state of mind I was in when I saw it, but Disney’s Moana feels like a movie about how easy it can be to give up, and how important it is not to. It’s funny, joyful, and sweet, and yet down below, running beneath…
Nancy Buirski’s By Sidney Lumet opens with the late filmmaker reflecting on his witnessing, as a young man, the rape of an underage girl by a group of soldiers on a train. Lumet was permanently haunted by the incident; what’s left unclear, until the end of the movie, is whether…
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…
Aisholpan Nurgaiv has never met this eagle she’s posing with — borrowed from a local animal wrangler — on a balcony at the London Hotel in West Hollywood. In 90-degree heat, she’s a 15-year-old girl sweating in her Mongolian winter clothes, including a hat made from the first fox she…
Ben Younger’s workmanlike but nevertheless rousing Bleed for This accomplishes something that’s a tall order for any boxing movie: It makes the inspirational training-montage sequences weird. Those are generally the most requisite and unexciting element of the genre, but Bleed for This freshens them thanks to the strange and disturbing…
Miami-based Venezuelan painter Aramis Gutierrez is known for his large canvases depicting quiet ballets, esoteric delusions of magic realism, and smoky stoicism. He cofounded the many iterations of the local art agitator Noguchi Breton, formerly known as Guccivuitton and Versace Versace Versace.
In one of the more bizarre coincidences of film scheduling, the brief life of a TV journalist whose biggest scoop was announcing her own death on air is recapitulated for the second time this year. Released in August, Robert Greene’s porous documentary Kate Plays Christine highlights the impossibility, even the…
Tom Ford has entirely overstuffed his nesting-doll domestic drama-cum-thriller Nocturnal Animals, and yet I spent much of the film worrying that it might not have a point. Its aesthetic footprint is huge, but its impact decidedly small scale. That’s not always a bad thing; there’s a perverse elegance to so…
Sure, teen comedies make stars of their leading ladies and fellas, but what about the authority figures? Eugene Levy’s nameless dad in American Pie is peripheral but memorable as a bumbly guiding force. Tina Fey’s Ms. Norbury in Mean Girls is a motherly but revelatory mess of a teacher. Harry…
Anna Biller’s ripe, vibrant The Love Witch is an act of reclamation — and love. In this out-of-time extravaganza of feminist-satanist serial-killer erotica, the writer/director/producer — plus editor and set and costume designer — has crafted the best kind of homage or parody, the kind that honors every thrill and…
The Amazon series Good Girls Revolt, centered on a landmark 1970 gender discrimination case at Newsweek, is the kind of period drama that’s more interested in commenting on the present than recreating the past. The storyline, about professional journalists, plays fast and loose with the facts, and creator Dana Calvo…
It’s fun watching Ginny Baker be rude to people. I was hesitant to give a chance to Pitch, the new Fox series imagining the life and career of the (fictional) first woman to play Major League Baseball, because I feared Ginny would be impossibly noble, driven and hardworking — the…
In 2010, when things on the internet were actually fun, Ronnie Rivera made it even more of a virtual party as one half of online arts collective Bleeding Palm. He took paparazzi-style photos at live events at a time when everyone woke up bright and early the next afternoon, drenched in alcohol sweat and cigarette stink, to see if someone had snapped a cool pic of them the night before and posted it on a website.
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is a small film burdened with the epic, thanks to both its subject and its setting. Based on Ben Fountain’s 2012 novel, it depicts a day in the life of a young soldier (Joe Alwyn) briefly returning from Iraq to be honored with his squad…
One day, Denis Villeneuve will make a truly great movie. This is, apparently, a controversial opinion. Many out there feel strongly that the Canadian filmmaker has been leaping from triumph to triumph in recent years — with Sicario, Prisoners and Enemy under his belt — while some consider him a…
With films like Take Shelter, Mud and even this spring’s somewhat uneven Midnight Special, Jeff Nichols has steadily built a filmography of terse beauty. With Loving, he tackles the kind of boldface subject matter that Oscar season feeds on: It’s a historical drama about the 1967 Supreme Court decision that…
Haters Back Off!, a new eight-episode comedy streaming on Netflix, is about putting yourself out there, ignoring the haters, following your dreams no matter who or what stands in your way and utterly humiliating yourself on YouTube. Also at church socials, gay bars, funerals, rest homes — really anywhere Miranda…
The exciting partnership between the Miami Jewish Film Festival and Miami Beach Cinematheque continues, with the Masters of Jewish Cinema series hitting its fourth year. After covering Billy Wilder, Sidney Lumet, Louis Malle, Charlie Chaplin, and Francois Truffaut, the pair will bring a retrospective of classic Hollywood musicals to…
