The Ten Best Women-Directed Films of 2015

Real talk: Women making movies are awesome. It would be easy to just post that as a complete article, because it’s true and we all know it, but end-of-year lists so rarely highlight films made by women due to the film industry being so focused on the overwhelming amount of…

Crime Drama Legend Pits Two Tom Hardys Against London

The big breakthrough in Legend, the latest well-crafted studio throwback from writer-director Brian Helgeland (Payback, A Knight’s Tale, 42)? At long last, here’s one movie with two often incomprehensible Tom Hardy characters, sometimes muttering their Cockney swears at each other inside the same scene. Hardy plays twins, real-life gangsters who…

Relax — The Force Awakens Is the Third Good Star Wars Movie

SPOILER ALERT: Skip the fifth paragraph if you don’t want to know before you see the film. George Lucas is the L. Ron Hubbard of Hollywood. Both men were sci-fi dreamers turned mega-millionaires who spun their pulp adventures into a religion. Tap the power within yourself, they urged. The faithful…

Quentin Tarantino Isn’t Telling You What to Think

Here’s a true story about a St. Louis murder that changed America. In 1837, a black freeman named Francis McIntosh stepped off a Mississippi riverboat and blundered into two white cops chasing a drunk sailor who’d called them names. They ordered McIntosh to stop the perp; when he refused, they…

How Star Wars-Style Fantasy Violence Conquered Our Culture

A while back, a friend expressed concern that her son, a 10-year-old, was watching too much My Little Pony. “It’s sweet,” she said, “but not what I’d choose.” I asked what she would prefer that he watch. “Well, his dad started him on that new Star Wars cartoon.” That cartoon…

The 10 Best TV Shows of 2015

This year turned out to be a challenging one for couch potatoes. In 2015, the “more programming, more problems” state of television held just as true for viewers as it did for network executives; there was simply too much to watch. But this annum of Peak TV has delivered some…

The Top 10 Films of 2015

How good was 2015 for movies? My first draft of a top ten was a staggering top 30. I had to make some agonizing cuts. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it: Watch every one by New Year’s Eve. OK, OK, at least by New Year’s Eve next year…

Ten Movies You Can’t Miss in 2016

As we approach the end of another year in moviegoing — and as the industry prepares for its annual spasm of awards and accolades — it seems an apt time to look ahead. Here are ten films you won’t want to miss in 2016. 1. The Invitation (Dir. Karyn Kusama)…

The Best Movies of 2015

No sentence distills the essence of one strain of cinephilia — mine especially — better than this one: “Motion pictures are for people who like to watch women.” Bracing in its profound simplicity, this line was written in 1983 by Boyd McDonald (1925–1993), author of the essential collection Cruising the…

Orion Spins the Mad Story of the Man Who Filled Elvis’ Void

The drawback was they had one Elvis,” an ex-girlfriend of Jimmy Ellis deadpans in Jeanie Finlay’s tragicomic doc Orion: The Man Who Would Be King. Ellis, an Alabama-born singer whose voice shared much of Elvis Presley’s timbre and husky power, had tried for years to hit the big time, touring…

Borscht Corp. Alumni Get Into Sundance With Five New Films

When it comes to Miami indie film production, everyone knows Borscht Corp. has been on a roll. Yesterday, the Sundance Film Festival  announced that it has accepted an unprecedented five films from the filmmaking collective to premiere at next month’s festival in Park City, Utah. Four short films and a…

Wim Wenders’ Every Thing Will Be Fine Is a Movie Gone Wrong

A disheartening case of When Auteurs Go Affected, Every Thing Will Be Fine confirms that Wim Wenders — making his first dramatic feature since 2008’s Palermo Shooting — is a filmmaker now light-years removed from his Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire heyday. Egregiously airless and artificial, Wenders’s latest (written…