Masterminds Leaves You Time to Wonder: Does Director Jared Hess Hate Poor Folks?

When Relativity Media — the production company/distributor behind Masterminds, the newest vehicle for Zach Galifianakis to do his painfully committed schtick — started getting press, co-founder/co-CEO Ryan Kavanaugh boasted of his secret sauce for success. A proprietary risk-evaluation algorithm that crunched variables like cast, release date, relative examples in the…

Classic Films Showing in Miami This October

With October arriving and the smell of pumpkin in the air, it’s the season for freaky midnight movies full of ghosts and gore. But it’s also just another month in Miami, where there are always plenty of classic films to go around. Spooky or not, these screenings are sure to…

Judy Davis on the Art of Acting — and Being Judy Davis

Judy Davis doesn’t like the expression “scene-stealing,” even though it precisely describes her performance in The Dressmaker. “I always sort of cringe when I hear that,” she says, “because what it implies is that’s what the actor is after.” So let’s just put it this way: As Kate Winslet’s acerbic,…

Opportunity Knox — but Goes Unanswered by this Middling Doc

In the nine years since she was first accused of and jailed for murder — then exculpated, only to be retried and found guilty again, and finally absolved — Amanda Knox has learned a thing or two about performance. “Either I’m a psychopath in sheep’s clothing…,” the 21st century’s most…

Come What May Makes the Invasion of France a Soaring Tribute to Cliché

Christian Carion’s refugees-on-the-march World War II drama Come What May is the kind of old-fashioned war movie that’s crafted not just to emphasize history’s horror and brutality. Yes, Carion stages the occasional slaughter with heartsick brio, and sometimes can’t resist taking pleasure when the violence goes against the bad guys,…

With Miss Peregrine, Tim Burton Shows He’s Still Got Wonder in Him

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 Makes Rousing Adventure From a Real-Life Tragedy

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…

Fleabag Is the Egocentric Comedy Heroine of Your Dreams/Nightmares

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…

Storks Is So Funny You Might Forgive Its Mawkish Weirdness

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…

Jerry Lewis Soldiers Through the Mawkish Drama Max Rose

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…

Not Magnificent, but Not Bad

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 New Doc on the JT LeRoy Literary Hoax Settles for One Side

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…