Eat That Question Sifts Through Frank Zappa’s Cosmik Debris

Steve Allen didn’t know what to make of Frank Zappa. The clean-cut young musician was promising to “play the bicycle” on the set of The Steve Allen Show in 1963, spinning the wheels and tapping on the spokes. The result, with the help of a tuneless orchestra behind him and…

Sci-Fi Romance Equals Is a Nothing Movie About a Nothing World

The futuristic dystopia of the arty sci-fi romance Equals will be familiar to anyone who’s seen the likes of Gattaca, The Island or THX 1138. It’s a cool, rational, lifeless world, blanketed in whites and grays and blues, and peopled with unfeeling faces — a world whose citizens will express…

Lights Out Is Creepiest When It Stops Explaining Itself

Does it matter that Freddy Krueger was a pedophilic middle-school janitor who died in a blazing fire when parents sought revenge? No. And unless you’re a horror-film obsessive, you probably don’t even know how he morphed into a pizza-faced Where’s Waldo with knife fingers — what matters is he lives…

Six Miami Predictions for Ballers‘ Season 2

Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson and his hit series Ballers is back for its second season this Sunday night at 10 p.m., and you know what that means: more of HBO showing you what peak Miami looks like. Ballers is so very Miami. It’s so Miami, even Miami itself thinks it’s…

Tony Robbins Can Talk You Into Anything

Here’s a story you might have missed a few weeks back, what with the country collapsing. In late June, at Dallas’ Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center, 30 aspirational souls received burn treatment after walking over hot coals at a Tony Robbins seminar. Robbins, a seize-your-life salesman of granite physique and…

In Its Second Season, Hulu’s Difficult People Is Easy to Watch

In the world of Difficult People, the cutting comedy returning this week to Hulu, the game is rigged against Julie (Julie Klausner) and Billy (Billy Eichner), but perhaps only because they rigged it against themselves. As their friends find success, the two struggling comedians feign interest in jobs that pay…

In The Infiltrator, Bryan Cranston Leaves Walter White Behind

Bryan Cranston may be best known for his arresting performance as DIY drug lord Walter White in Breaking Bad, but even that intense role doesn’t fully show his range. From portraying historical figures such as President Lyndon B. Johnson to Malcolm in the Middle’s wacky dad, Cranston has proven he…

Bonkers New Doc Tickled Digs Into the Strangest of Coverups

In a stark white room, four boys huddle on a mattress, addressing the camera. They’re athletic, the picture of youth and every Abercrombie & Fitch catalog. A blond boy says, “We want to thank Jane O’Brien Media for this opportunity,” and they all smile and wave. They’re about to take…

The Directors of Tickled Dish About Going Up Against a No-Joke Conspiracy

Dylan Reeve and David Farrier’s Tickled might be the oddest documentary you’ll see this year. It starts off with Farrier, a New Zealand TV reporter specializing in human-interest fare, discovering the world of Competitive Endurance Tickling — in which teams of strapping young men tickle each other for extended periods…

All-Too-Normal Activity Dominates the Ghostbusters Remake

Kindly allow this lengthy aside and conspiracy theorizing: I can’t start my review of Paul Feig’s redo of Ghostbusters without first mentioning the stupefying chaos that attended last Thursday evening’s press screening, the only one of two scheduled a half-hour apart in New York before the movie’s opening. This unprecedented…

Mike and Dave Need a Better Movie

Sometimes a movie seems like it was more fun to make than it is to watch. Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates is one of those movies. Zac Efron and Adam DeVine are Dave and Mike Stangle, two troublemaking brothers with a knack for walking the tightrope of party-makers/breakers. With…

Anne Fontaine’s The Innocents Finds Strength in Grayness

If there’s a war movie we haven’t seen enough of yet, it’s one from the female perspective, one that further obscures who the good guys and bad guys really are. In Anne Fontaine’s moody feature The Innocents, even the nuns are gray. During a bitterly cold winter, tucked away in…