The Danish Girl, Tom Hooper’s portrait of Jazz Age painters Gerda Wegener and her spouse Einar, who butterflied into Lili Elbe via the first sex-reassignment surgery, is about gender and it isn’t. Like its subject, it’s fatally resolved to fit an ideal: the noble Oscar-bait biopic. If the script swapped…
Ralph Rainger and Leo Robin’s sweet nectarine of a jazz standard “Easy Living” figures, in a glancing yet potent way, in Todd Haynes’ Carol, adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt. Even though the lyrics speak of contentment — “Living for you is easy living/It’s easy to…
Concussion isn’t much of a movie, but it’s a fascinating bellwether for where the National Football League stands on chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the degenerative brain disease associated with many of its former players. It so happens that the human brain isn’t supposed to whip against the skull like a…
Fueled by impotent, blustery outrage, Adam McKay’s The Big Short, about the grotesque banking and investing practices that led to the 2008 financial collapse, is about as fun and enlightening as a cranked-up portfolio manager’s rue-filled comedown after an energy-shot bender. Based on Michael Lewis’s 2010 bestselling book of the…
Here’s to Quentin Tarantino’s cussed perversity. The Hateful Eight — his intimate, suspenseful western splatter-horror comedy — has been shot at great expense in the long-gone 70 mm format, but the movie itself is set almost entirely in cramped interiors. He’s hired Ennio Morricone to score the thing, but don’t…
What’s been missing for years in Hollywood’s adventure films? Verisimilitude. Correspondent with the rise of the computers, and the ability to show us any place that filmmakers can imagine, has been the fall of immersiveness — that sense that the actors are in a place you can’t go yourself rather…
Here’s a challenge. Gather some friends, pour some drinks and announce to everyone the premise of Daddy’s Home, the new family comedy about dads competing to be pater superior. It won’t take long: Will Ferrell is a doting schlemiel of a stepdad to suburban moppets whose biological father, played by…
In most of his eight films and especially since The Fighter (2010), choreographer of chaos and screwball scion David O. Russell has assembled boisterous, buoyant casts. His manic ensemble players, like those in Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, carom off one another, their high-pitched energy keeping the movies bustling…
Life is hard for the extravagantly wealthy lounging about in one of the world’s most beautiful hotels. Paolo Sorrentino’s latest might seem easy to mock — here, after all, are Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel, playing a composer and a film director, moping in a Swiss spa about old age…
Lurid, muscular and unafraid to look at turn-of-the-century Manhattan’s rotting guts, The Knick has distinguished itself in the crowded antihero-drama landscape through its mosaic portrait of a city on the verge of implosion and epidemic – detailed with an extraordinary visual expressiveness (courtesy of Steven Soderbergh, who directs every episode)…
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…
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…
Note the image above. The 1980 Pulitzer Prize-winning photo depicts a firing squad aimed and ready in Iran. After the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979, former members of the Shah’s regime — and also people like homosexuals, drug offenders, and ethnic Kurds — were executed after speedy “trials” by…
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…
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…
Here’s the statistical quirk that sums up Mad Max: Fury Road’s sensational greatness: 73 of the 127 critics voting in our annual poll picked George Miller’s apocalyptic Busytown Racers classic as one of the year’s best films. Only one of those critics voted for it in the Best Screenplay category…
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…
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…
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…
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)…
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…
What’s quietly revolutionary about Sisters is that it’s a dumb party movie like a million others. The hosts score booze, invite over dozens of friends and frenemies and then watch in horror – and a touch of self-congratulatory awe – as their house gets trashed. With the sunrise come lessons,…
