“They should have sent a poet,” says Jodie Foster’s teary-eyed astronaut as she gazes upon the glory of space in Contact. It took nearly 20 years, but Terrence Malick has taken it upon himself to answer that call with Voyage of Time. Not every line rhymes, and some privilege sound…
Here’s a gorgeous and audacious slice of East Bay life that’s dreamily attentive to Northern California sun and concrete, to the shambled beauty of a street couch under a BART station, to the slow thump of cruising stoned with hip hop bumping, to the way suburb-city edges into city-city and…
Our critic April Wolfe is filing updates all week from the Toronto International Film Festival. Writer/director Ivan I. Tverdovsky may be a twentysomething male, but in his sophomore feature, he exhibits a direct pipeline into the psyche of a lonely, middle-aged woman. In Zoology, a lowly zoo worker suddenly sprouts…
As October approaches and cinephiles are craving fresh films from the festival circuit, Miami Film Festival is handing us exactly what we need when we need it. In an announcement today at the Wynwood location of the festival’s official timekeeper, Shinola, Miami Film Festival revealed its lineup for GEMS, the…
Better Things’ creators seem to anticipate that you’ll judge Sam Fox’s parenting – and they make you pay for it. In the first scene, Sam (Pamela Adlon) scrolls through her phone on a mall bench while her youngest daughter, Duke (Olivia Edward), cries and pulls on her arm. It’s one…
Our critic April Wolfe is filing updates all week from the Toronto International Film Festival. When a quiet film is set outside of the big cities — New York, L.A., Chicago — it’s often called a “slice of life.” But that’s ultimately a condescending designation; to the millions of people…
According to Forbes, Fan Bingbing made $17 million last year — more than any actress on the planet not named Jennifer Lawrence, Melissa McCarthy, Scarlett Johansson or Jennifer Aniston. The Chinese megastar is likely most familiar to American audiences for a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it role in X-Men: Days of Future Past, but…
At first glance, TV (The Book), which came out last week, may look like a survey of what two respected TV critics consider to be the greatest television shows of all time. But, really, it’s a book about friendship. The joint authors of this tome, Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller…
To show all that he can do, to show something of what life’s actually like, Donald Glover first has to break your heart. Glover – the star, creator, and often writer of FX’s tense, downwardly mobile hangout comedy Atlanta – is best known, still, as a handsome clown on NBC’s Community, Dan…
Set aside your visions of histrionic, paranoid fireworks. Oliver Stone’s whistleblower biopic Snowden finds the director in an unusually somber and controlled mood, perhaps because of the introverted, awkward nature of Edward Snowden himself. The former CIA employee and National Security Agency contractor, who in 2013 exposed the U.S. government’s…
What’s constant in Katherine Dieckmann’s films – Motherhood (2009), Diggers (2006) and A Good Baby (2000) – is an attention to characters and place. Many of us in the world of film reside in the big coastal cities, but a good number come from somewhere else, smaller towns with subtle…
Starting with 1985’s No End, composer Zbigniew Preisner served as one of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s closest collaborators — he worked on all of the director’s films until Kieslowski’s death in 1996, with several of their collaborations actually revolving around the world of music. (The duo even created a fake Dutch composer, Van den Budenmayer,…
Looking back at this dismal summer of superhero adaptations, I am reminded of something Chris Rock said during the 77th Academy Awards: “There are only four real stars, and the rest are just popular people.” This was February 2005, mind you — a few months before Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins…
The Hollars tells the familiar tale of a dysfunctional family pulled together by unfortunate circumstances. John Hollar (John Krasinski, who also directed) is a frustrated graphic novelist with a pregnant girlfriend, Rebecca (Anna Kendrick). When he gets the news that his mother, Sally (Margo Martindale), has a brain tumor, he…
“Hi! My name is Harold. I’m 31 years young, just a normal American guy.” Harold wears a striped polo shirt buttoned to the top and his hair in a long, John Oliver-esque shag. Speaking with the mild-mannered lilt of a suburban dad, he describes his hobbies: gardening, hula-hooping, eating pizza…
Bridget Jones mines the riches of embarrassment. Her gaffes, blunders, stumbles and pratfalls provide the laughs in the atypical romcoms built around her, films that rely heavily on the comedy of idiosyncrasy. Bridget is no outsider: She’s a straight, white, middle class, university-educated woman with a London apartment, a media…
“I don’t have any answers,” Krzysztof Kieslowski once said, “but [I] do know how to pose questions.” Not an uncommon stance for an artist, certainly, but perhaps surprising for one who made a massive, 10-part miniseries based on the Ten Commandments. Later, trying to explain why he and screenwriter Krzysztof…
Since III Points launched in 2013, its mission has been bringing the most innovative talent in three industries—music, technology, and art—to Wynwood. This year, the festival is expanding its definition of art with the addition of Vanguard Film Week, a four-day series of films from prestigious festivals like Sundance and…
The Circus: Inside the Greatest Political Show on Earth airs Sundays on Showtime In filmmaking, an assembly cut is when recent dailies are strung together in rough narrative order to create the first, very raw draft of the movie. Though it by no means lacks polish or editorial intent, Showtime’s…
The Bachelor stands erect as the vanguard of heterosexual romance competitions. Bachelor in Paradise (BIP), whose third season concludes this week, is the sunburnt, daydrunk cousin of the ABC franchise. Set in the Ewok Village on the Planet Endor (the perfect place to fall in love), the summertime distraction stars…
The most destructive villain in this year’s summer movies isn’t some super-powered fiend. It’s us, the consumers of North America, whose desires shape the world. The U.S. looms over Jayro Bustamante’s patient, observant, exquisitely painful debut feature Ixcanul, just as it looms over the Guatemalan coffee plantation in which Bustamante’s…
Eight minutes into the pilot episode of Cinemax’s new crime show Quarry — an uneven but largely rewarding translation of Max Allan Collins’ crime books into emotionally challenging, character-driven television — Marine Lloyd “Mac” Conway, Jr. (Logan Marshall-Green) returns home a day early from his second tour in Vietnam. By…
