Rebecca Hall Is The Gift‘s Great Gift

From the trailer, and just from its initial vibe, Joel Edgerton’s directorial debut The Gift looks like your stock “When bad things happen to good people” thriller, complete with a soulful pet dog you just know is going to get it. But dog lovers, and everyone else, should know that…

Nina Hoss Illuminates Petzold’s Great Thriller Phoenix

Some of the best love songs are those whose lyrics perch precariously between “I adore you, let’s be happy forever” and “I’m miserable without you, where have you gone?” Together, the melody and words of Kurt Weill and Ogden Nash’s 1943 ballad “Speak Low” take the shape of a vaporous…

iPhone Feature Tangerine Is an Exuberant, Piercing Comedy

There’s probably only one humanist film that opens with the words “Merry Christmas Eve, bitch!” accompanied by the proffering of a single, sprinkle-dusted doughnut. In Sean Baker’s Tangerine, best friends, transgender women, and prostitutes Sin-Dee and Alexandra (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor) catch up at a doughnut joint on…

Cruise’s Mission: Impossible Series Gets Street-Smart

At 53, Tom Cruise is past the retirement age of every James Bond except Roger Moore. Yet not only does his 19-year-old Mission: Impossible series tick on, counting down the seconds till its next explosion, but Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is also determined to unman his cross-Atlantic competition. Forget high-tech gadgets…

A Lego Brickumentary Has Great Pieces, but What Have They Built?

How much time would you like to spend in the company of benignly kooky hobbyists? That’s the question to ask before committing to docu-commercial A Lego Brickumentary, a largely genial but frequently wearying feature-length toy ad. The film’s central conceit is sound enough: Lego construction kits “unlock [users’] imagination,” in…

Tangerine‘s Transgender Stars Are Ready to Take Hollywood

The pizza joint Shakey’s in Hollywood is packed when transgender actresses Mya Taylor and Kiki Rodriguez slide into a booth with their director Sean Baker, whose shot-on-location-and-on-iPhone comedy Tangerine was the most talked-about surprise of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Taylor, the quieter and more glamorously aloof of the pair…

Roy Andersson’s Latest Out-of-Time Comedy Is a Light in the Dark

World cinema may have no better builder of delightful scenes than Roy Andersson, the deadpan Swedish existentialist. Each shot in an Andersson film is part diorama, part theatrical performance, part moviemaking the way Thomas Edison did it: Build a set, plant a camera, and stage highly orchestrated comedy and tragedy…

Vacation Is Back, but It’s No Pleasure Trip

It’s been 32 years since the release of National Lampoon’s Vacation, in which Chevy Chase, as dad Clark Griswold, packed his Griswold clan into what looked like a Country Squire from Hell and sought the family-bonding experienceTM by driving cross-country to a mythical mega — amusement park known as Walley…

The Ten Most Miami Things About HBO’s Ballers

HBO has renewed Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s Miami based football comedy Ballers for a second season, which means so much more Miami. Ballers is like if you wrote the word Miami on a piece of paper, covered it with glue, then poured an entire bottle of glitter on it — it’s incredibly…

Boxing Drama Southpaw Pummels the Audience

The opening of Antoine Fuqua’s Southpaw, shot in gritty, grayed-out tones, is a grim harbinger: A fighter getting ready for the ring holds up his meaty paws for the ritualistic wrapping of gauze and tape. His gloves are slipped over the wrappings, and then they’re taped on too — but…