Mike White’s father-and-son college-trip comedy-drama Brad’s Status is legitimately more frightening than anything in It. Quite aside from the fact that real life is always scarier than monsters from the beyond, the writer-director’s deep understanding of envy, entitlement and embarrassment has never been more nightmarishly effective. But don’t expect one…
If I could sum up my experience this week at the Austin-based genre film festival Fantastic Fest in a word, it would be “exhausting.” In years past, that complete physical and mental breakdown might come mostly from the mind-blowing cinema and rowdy events of the festival, but now it is…
BoJack Horseman streams on Netflix It’s not a huge surprise that my sensitive and kind-hearted spouse could be left sobbing by an episode of a popular TV show. She’d say herself that she’s an easy mark, TV showrunners. But it’s definitely a surprise when any show even tries. TV writers…
Gerald’s Game premieres on Netflix on Sept. 29 One of the most hilarious things I’ve ever seen on television comes early in The Langoliers, a 1995 ABC miniseries adapted by Tom Holland from a Stephen King novella. It’s the one about a small group of travelers waking up on a…
In Battle of the Sexes, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’ film rehashing the most infamous tennis match in modern history, Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) must brawl with the coed United States Tennis Association for equal pay as she comes to terms with her attraction to women and what might be…
Just a little more than three months ago, Tom Cruise starred in a lifeless wannabe-blockbuster called The Mummy that made little use of his innate charisma (shut up, he still has some) or his star persona, turning him into an anonymous action hero. Now comes American Made, a picture that…
Please accept what follows as a considered statement, arrived at through observation and experience, and not as film-review hype or boilerplate: Kate Mulleavy and Laura Mulleavy’s Woodshock is the rare drug movie that, as you watch it, if you surrender to it, stirs the sensations of having taken drugs. I’m…
There’s no delicate way to say this, so I’ll just spit it out. I spent the first 10 minutes of Stronger, David Gordon Green’s eventually potent drama of trauma and recovery, trying to work out whether star Jake Gyllenhaal was intending to suggest that the real-life Bostonian at the story’s…
Arlington’s Frame4Frame Festival gets rolling Thursday, with more than 20 films set to screen during the event. Now in its second year, the festival also features art and live music around downtown Arlington. The film screenings will take place Sept. 22-24 at Studio Movie Grill in Lincoln Square. “There’s a…
LA Weekly film critic April Wolfe is reporting for us from the Toronto International Film Festival. The documentary section of TIFF has a reputation for programming the types of films that can easily compete for audience attention with the narrative juggernauts, and this year is no different. From Agnes Varda’s wacky…
Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! is so much movie that critics April Wolfe and Alan Scherstuhl have elected to sync up Pacific Rim-style to take it on. Warning: The discussion below delves right into what we might call spoilers if a movie like Mother! could be spoiled. Now let’s drift. April, Each…
The sequel to 2015’s hit Kingsman: The Secret Service won’t make you feel the urgent need to take a shower and/or throw up, like the original probably did. Believe it or not, that’s not always a good thing. Kingsman: The Golden Circle, Matthew Vaughn’s follow-up to his brutal, joyfully degenerate…
L.A. Weekly film critic April Wolfe is reporting for us from the Toronto International Film Festival. Filmmaking is not a poor man’s game. Even as digital cameras get cheaper, making a festival-worthy film still requires dough to get off the ground, which means the folks who tell stories through cinema…
Strong Island premieres on Netflix on Sept. 15 The tragic truth remains that all it takes in America for a white person to get away with killing a black person is for the white person to convince the right people — a judge, a jury, a prosecutor — of his…
LA Weekly film critic April Wolfe is reporting for us from the Toronto International Film Festival. Writer-director Dee Rees is breaking all the rules with her third feature, Mudbound. In film school, they tell you, “No voiceovers,” yet this film about two WWII and post-war Mississippi families — one black, one…
April Wolfe is reporting for us from the Toronto International Film Festival. I’d gone into the theater knowing nothing of the Chloe Zhao’s The Rider except that my colleague Bilge Ebiri adored it — and that I’d get to to witness some breathtaking cinematography capturing the dusky pastels streaking the…
April Wolfe is reporting for us from the Toronto International Film Festival. Dictators are a certain kind of selfish, insecure insanity made manifest, and if you’re going to study them, Joseph Stalin is a good place to start. “Stalin” wasn’t even his real name. When he was 30, he changed…
When actor/writer/director Justin Chon was 11, his father took in early news reports about the Los Angeles riots of 1992 and left without a word to drive to the family’s shoe store in Paramount, a relatively poor 4.8-square-mile city bordered by Compton and Downey. “In a lot of Korean families,…
First They Killed My Father premieres on Netflix on Sept. 15 It would have been easy for Angelina Jolie’s adaptation of Cambodian genocide survivor Loung Ung’s 2000 memoir to go ruthlessly and repeatedly for the emotional jugular. First They Killed My Father is, after all, the story of a young…
Top of the Lake: China Girl airs on SundanceTV Jane Campion’s initial plan for Top of the Lake, her SundanceTV drama about sexual violence in a rural New Zealand town, was for the story of haunted detective Robin Griffin (Elisabeth Moss) to come to a full stop at the end…
In Eliza Hittman’s debut feature, It Felt Like Love, a young girl tests the waters of adult sexuality, offering her body up to the statuesque bros who live in her Eastern Seaboard beach town. She tries her hardest to mimic the women in pornos, the ones all the boys want,…
Fire Chasers premieres Sept. 8 on Netflix The greatest surprise is the beauty. The gripping new Netflix documentary series Fire Chasers opens with visions of orange-and-black hell, of ash and apocalypse, of California homes and trees and horizons ablaze, of the sky itself now some jack-o’-lantern’s smile. The fire brightens…
