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…
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…
At the start of Woody Allen’s campus comedy Irrational Man, caddish professor Abe Lucas (Joaquin Phoenix) drives up to a new school that has already steeled itself for his arrival. “Of course, my reputation — a reputation — preceded me,” Abe admits. Such defensiveness also applies to his tabloid-attacked director,…
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…
Here’s a shocker: In Pixels, his latest, Adam Sandler plays a stunted man-child who turns out to be very, very special. That’s his ecological niche: the Manic Potbellied Dream Dork, or, if you prefer, the fragile Sand-Man.
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…
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…
“Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow,” Stephen Dedalus declared in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In the case of Jimmy Gralton, she took bites and spat him out a couple of times. It’s tempting to say some people never learn, but, as played…
A reality show based on car restoration might not seem like the most groundbreaking idea you’ve ever heard, but Discovery’s new show Cuban Chrome represents so much more than that. The new series follows the A Lo Cubano Car Club, a group of antique car enthusiasts who were granted unprecedented access to film on…
The problem with clamoring for more woman-led comedies is that actual comedy may be the thing that ends up being left by the wayside. Tina Fey, among others, has railed against the boneheaded dictum that women can’t be funny. But in the current climate of watchfulness — one in which…
If you were to hear there’s a new street-crime revenge thriller that pairs a grown-up recent Oscar nominee/beloved TV star with Jennifer Lopez, you would probably respond, “This must be January” and “Even if it’s terrible, that movie will make serious money.” But the lead this time is not Liam…
It’s heartbreaking that, in his last dramatic film, Robin Williams plays depressed and repressed, burdened by secrets, a man incapable of connecting. In Boulevard, Williams invests himself in the role of a closeted Nashville bank manager married to a woman for whom he feels only sexless affection. Clearly, the actor…
We may not need another hero, but true believers don’t need to shrink-ray their expectations. Ant-Man is the first Marvel film — and the first of this summer’s pixels-go-kablooey time-wasters — to get better as it goes. The filmmakers save their biggest, wiggiest ideas for the climaxes, where they wittily…
Above all else, a movie built around a star promises presence, and in Bill Condon’s Mr. Holmes, that promise is dual: Here are 104 minutes with the great Ian McKellen, for once not casting spells, controlling magnetism, or classing up script pages of expositional gobbledygook. It’s not his job, this…
New York has often been the setting for films about heroin addicts, with titles ranging from Shirley Clarke’s cinéma-vérité-tweaking The Connection (1961) to Slava Tsukerman’s new-wave cult classic Liquid Sky (1982) mining the drama of smack freaks tying off, shooting up, and nodding out. But Josh and Benny Safdie’s tough,…
Children’s programming is about to get a little friendlier. Los Angeles-based and Miami-bred art collaborative Friendswithyou recently announced a partnership with Netflix to produce and air at least two seasons of a characteristically bright, colorful, and smiley-faced kids show. According to an interview with artnet News, True and the Rainbow…
Imagine Donald Trump wanted to reboot his disastrous presidential campaign announcement month to start over as a younger man with real hair. In Tarsem Singh’s Self/less, Trump could hire the medical geniuses of Phoenix Biogenic to transfer his aging brain into a strapping hot bod for $250 million — the…
Hollywood lives by the simple, sad axiom “Where there’s money, there’s more money,” which is how we get remakes of movies that sometimes shouldn’t have been made in the first place, two Spider-Man reboots within five years, and a Star Wars franchise that ensures our children’s children will revere George…
The death of Amy Winehouse, in July 2011, at age 27, was one of the first great tragedies of 21st-century pop music, an event — like the deaths of Tupac Shakur and Kurt Cobain in the last decade of the 20th — that emphasized the jarring contrast between the fragility…
Even if you live in the same city or town your whole life, the place you came from is always a distant country: Old trees are cut down to be replaced, one hopes, by new ones; shops and businesses change ownership or, worse, are torn down; landmarked buildings may stay…
On the fringes of movieland, there have always been filmmakers who identify (in Günter Eich’s phrase) as being sand, not oil, in the gears of the world. Aleksei German, dead in 2013 at 74, could be thought of as this tribe’s most extreme rock star, in his work-life and in…
There’s no one right way to show mental illness in the movies, yet there are hundreds of ways to get it wrong. Even though certain disorders come with specific traits, a diagnosis is not a human being, and doomed is the actor who just cycles through symptoms, rather than working…
