Ozark premieres on Netflix July 21 When Skyler White challenged her husband’s secret fun life of crime on Breaking Bad, the backlash to her drove Anna Gunn to write an op-ed in The New York Times. Gunn revealed that a number of disturbing “hate boards” had often conflated her with…
A “feminist” film need not portray all its female characters in a positive light. Women aren’t a monolith of benevolence. Still, a film with multiple female characters who are equal parts sympathetic and sadistic, who face off against one another in a battle of wits and will, exposing some harsh…
It must be nice being Luc Besson, stuck at the age of 14 for the past 44 years. Back when I was that age, in the late 1980s, Besson was among my favorite working filmmakers. I adored the earnest wonder of the deep-sea worlds of The Big Blue (1988) and…
At 88 years young, the rebel-shaman filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky has led an eclectic life and enjoyed a provocative career not easily encapsulated. His 1970 acid western, El Topo, crowned him godfather of the midnight-movie craze. His phantasmagoric 1973 masterpiece, The Holy Mountain, was ripped off by Kanye West for the…
Truth in advertising: Girls trip hard during their New Orleans getaway in Girls Trip, which maybe doesn’t need that possessive apostrophe after all. Malcolm D. Lee’s comedy, written by Kenya Barris and Tracy Oliver — the same creative team behind last year’s uneven Barbershop: The Next Cut — pops with…
“Every love story is a ghost story,” David Foster Wallace wrote, more than once. That evocative observation is probed in David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, a film that occasionally reaches a similar level of eloquence. Lowery’s fourth feature reunites Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck, the leads of his second, the…
From Game of Thrones to The Handmaid’s Tale, narratives of sexual assault have become particularly common in film and TV lately. But rarely do we think about the filmmakers, actors and crew who make on-screen rapes happen. How do they feel? Are they tired of rape scenes? Or could portraying rape could actually be a positive thing?
The nerve-racking war thriller Dunkirk is the movie Christopher Nolan’s entire career has been building up to, in ways that even he may not have realized. He’s taken the British Expeditionary Force’s 1940 evacuation from France, early in World War II — a moment of heroism-in-defeat that has become an…
To the Bone premieres July 14 on Netflix About 10 minutes into Marti Noxon’s eating-disorder drama, To the Bone, Ellen (Lily Collins) sneaks away from her overbearing stepmom, Susan (Carrie Preston), to chug warm water from a public-bathroom faucet (a trick to fool the body into thinking it’s full so…
The new tech comedy Loaded (AMC) opens seconds before the finalization of the sale of a game app called Cat Factory for £300 million. Confirmation from his bank that his account balance has gone from several hundred quid in the red to David Cameron’s tax bracket propels lead designer Josh…
Chasing Coral premieres July 14 on Netflix. In February of 1995 Charlton Heston called Rush Limbaugh’s radio program to read from Jurassic Park – the book, not the movie. In his best Old Testament boom, Heston declaimed a speech about man’s hubris that Michael Crichton had written for Dr. Ian…
Dueling images of Catholic nuns portray either holier-than-thou punishers in habits or hippie types with acoustic guitars, like the postulant Maria in The Sound of Music. Both stereotypes obscure the fact that, in real life, a lot of nuns are just … kind of weird. At one of the many…
The first time Dutch director Paul Verhoeven read the script for RoboCop, he was enjoying a day at the beach. Verhoeven says he got about 20 pages through it before dismissing it as just another piece of “American nonsense.” Then he went for a swim, and when he returned to…
Somehow, while we were worrying about superheroes and star destroyers and hot rods and whether Captain America could beat up Superman or whatever, the goddamned Planet of the Apes movies became the most vital and resonant big-budget film series in the contemporary movie firmament. And they did it with the…
Chasing Coral premieres on Netflix on Friday, July 14. Jeff Orlowski grew up wanting to be a nature photographer. But like so many in that field, his work now focuses less on capturing Earth’s natural wonders than it does on cataloguing their steady demise. “This is an entire field of…
The documentary Elián posits the story of 5-year-old Elián González, who was rescued off the coast of Florida in 1999 after attempting to leave Cuba with his mother (who drowned) — a long with its aftermath — as the birth of the 24-hour news cycle. More striking here, though, is…
Maudie is hit-or-miss, but you’ll probably bawl anyway. Its creators have elected to dramatize nothing but the things that traditional narrative features usually botch. The film, directed by Aisling Walsh, surveys the life of a beloved artist, Nova Scotia’s self-taught folk painter Maud Lewis, who produced scores of cheerily primitive…
Snowfall airs Wednesdays on FX Days before the Tupac Shakur biopic All Eyez on Me premiered, the news hit that John Singleton’s original script for the project opened the rapper’s story with Tupac being raped in prison. Singleton had left the ill-fated film twice before Benny Boom stepped in to…
Who knew Cate Blanchett wanted to be Tracey Ullman? That’s probably not the reaction director Julian Rosefeldt hopes will be stirred by this rigorous series of monologues, stitched together from more than 50 artistic and political manifestos and performed by Blanchett as 13 characters. But, like Ullman, Blanchett takes the…
On June 8, filmmaker Alex Kurtzman set the entertainment world ablaze when he told Business Insider that movie “critics and audiences don’t always sing the same song.” Despite grossing more than twice its $125 million budget, The Mummy, directed by Kurtzman and starring Tom Cruise, was universally panned by film…
Most hero stories dating back to Achilles are fantasies of power, of the world made right through violence. What sets Spider-Man apart, outside his joyous bouncing through New York City, is that his stories are also fantasies of responsibility. Rather than just kick bad-guy ass, Spider-Man must forever fight to…
The House on Coco Road premieres on Netflix on June 30 Quick, tell me everything you know about Grenada. If you’re over the age of 35, you can probably remember Ronald Reagan’s thin lips pronouncing the country’s name with a dangerous emphasis on the first two syllables, essentially weaponizing the…
