Disney’s Zootopia Paws at Segregated City Life

In Zootopia, animals do a lot of the things that animals in Disney movies usually do: They speak, to begin with; they walk upright and wear funny clothes; they exhibit attitudes that align or ironically misalign with their species’ appearance and reputation; they hold jobs; they experience outsize emotion and…

Miami International Film Festival 2016 Makes Miami Shine

The main offices for the 33rd-annual Miami International Film Festival (MIFF) are hidden within the 91-year-old Freedom Tower on Biscayne Boulevard. On a recent windy Monday morning, Jaie Laplante, the festival’s director of programming, laces his fingers around a paper coffee cup in the building’s shadow and shows off the…

As Terrible Movies Go, Gods of Egypt Is Pretty Grand

Let’s give Gods of Egypt this much: An hour in, a giant cobra crashes and explodes like a bad guy’s car in a dumb movie from the ’70s. That snake, one of two in Alex Proyas’ film, is wide as a locomotive and long as a parade. It’s also straddled…

Eddie the Eagle Is No Cool Runnings

In the Winter Olympics, ski jumping is one of those sports — bobsledding and luging are others — where Joe and Jane Satellite Dish cannot tell the difference between a great performance and a terrible one unless the athlete is carried away on a stretcher. No doubt there are crucial…

A Defense of Togetherness’ Blinding Whiteness

In a September interview with GQ, Constance Wu, star of NBC’s Fresh Off the Boat, observed of the HBO series Togetherness, “It’s a show about white people.” She’s not wrong: Created by indie-film luminaries Jay and Mark Duplass, along with the actor Steve Zissis, Togetherness is a low-key look at…

Jesse Owens Inspires, but Race Stumbles to the Finish Line

There is precisely one attempted coup de cinema in the Jesse Owens biopic Race, which otherwise defaults to the backlot handsomeness of other Great Men tributes from Hollywood. In 1935, Owens (Stephan James), a freshman sensation on the Ohio State University track team, returns to the locker room after practice…

A Comparatively Nuanced Faith-Based Drama, Risen Still Preaches to the Choir

The centerpiece of Hail, Caesar!’s mid-century Hollywood satire is the eponymous film-within-a-film itself, an overwrought biblical epic in which a skeptical Roman centurion played by George Clooney has a literal come-to-Jesus moment. Risen, whose plot can be described in exactly the same way, never inspires one of its own. Co-writer/director…

The Witch Is Creepy, Beautiful — and a Shrieking Mess

A laugh comes at last just before the end credits of Robert Eggers’ lit-class horror-bummer The Witch: a boastful note attesting to the documentary truthfulness of the dialogue in the movie we’ve just seen. Over 90 minutes that prove shriekiness is no impediment to ponderousness, we’ve beheld the harrowing of…

Bipolar Love Rages Through the Urgent Touched With Fire

Grown-ups may wince, but Paul Dalio’s earnest, ambitious manic-poet romance Touched With Fire is a gift to the young and passionately creative, to the brains-a-poppin’ kids caught up in invention and each other and the invention of each other. You don’t have to be bipolar to get caught up yourself…

Scorsese’s Vinyl Plasticizes Old NYC Grit

HBO’s Vinyl is the latest in a series of cultural hard-ons for the rough-and-tumble world of pre-Koch NYC: From novels like Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers and Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire to online photo galleries of graffiti-splattered subway trains and can-you-believe-this-juice-bar-used-to-be-a-crack-den slideshows, there’s a hunger for what Manhattan looked,…

Zoolander 2 Is a Tombstone for the Age of Dude Comedy

The first Zoolander, Ben Stiller’s dopey, fitfully funny fashion spoof, was released less than three weeks after the September 11 attacks. Its sequel shows the extent to which another kind of nefarious plot — the cynical quest for world domination through cross-brand synergy — has proven impossible to eradicate on…