Justin Kurzel’s is a Macbeth stripped of lit-class ponderousness, stage-bound declaiming, Ren Fest cosplay and prestige-film pomposity. It is the essence of this cruelest of plays, the blade unsheathed — and, as a blade would be after hacking through all these Scottish wars, its edge is blunt, rough, a thing…
Cynthia Nixon is such a terrific actress that she can steady even the wobbliest material. In writer-director Josh Mond’s modestly scaled family drama James White, she plays Gail, the mother of twentysomething underachiever James (Christopher Abbott, of Girls), a guy who can never seem to lay hands on a clean…
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin is the Taiwanese director’s first foray into the martial-arts genre. It may also be his most resplendent film yet: Watching it is like floating along on a sumptuous gold-and-lacquer cloud. Hou favorite Shu Qi (who also starred in Millennium Mambo and Three Times) plays Nie Yinniang,…
Oh Zeus, hear my lament that I was not present when Spike Lee imagined updating Lysistrata to present-day Chicago. I bet he burst himself cackling. Aristophanes’ 411 B.C. comedy, written during the three-decade Peloponnesian War, concocts a crazy scheme: Women refuse sex until their blue-balled men give in and declare…
In a 2001 interview, producer Lee Mendelson recalled the reaction of a CBS executive who attended a screening of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” shortly before it was scheduled to premiere, on December 9, 1965: “Well, it’s in the TV Guide logs — we gotta put it on the air. Nice…
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…
The heads of the City Dionysia, the Grecian playwriting competition that pitted Aeschylus against Sophocles and can be considered the original Oscars, had a rule: no original characters. Instead, the best creative minds of a generation — or really, a millennium — exhausted themselves finding new spins on, say, Medea…
Bob Birdnow’s Remarkable Tale of Human Survival and the Transcendence of Self is a work of fiction that puts TED Talks to shame. Local filmmaker and playwright Eric Steele has completed The Midwestern Trilogy he started back in 2008 with an absolute gem by adapting this one-man show into a…
Marvel’s Jessica Jones is smart, surprising and occasionally terrifying, a human tale of trauma and healing in a superhero vein. Its first episodes have more (unexploitative) sex scenes than battles, more shrugs and eye rolls than mighty kapows. But it’s not the shock or novelty that gives it resonance. Jessica…
The Nazis lost World War II, but they’ve conquered the American imagination. Seventy years after his suicide, Hitler is still everywhere: in the movies, on YouTube, in political headlines and on the History Channel. The latest manifestation of our Third Reich fixation is The Man in the High Castle, Amazon’s…
Saoirse Ronan makes a grand case for herself as the millennial generation’s finest leading lady in Brooklyn, an immaculately crafted, immensely moving character study about a 1950s immigrant struggling to find her place in the world. With an open, innocent countenance equally capable of registering tremulous separation anxiety, exhilarating joy…
With the spectacular The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2, the best in the series, Jennifer Lawrence closes out the franchise that made her the biggest star of her generation. Since The Hunger Games started, in 2012, she’s starred in four of them and only six of everything else. Luckily,…
How funny, really, are dick pics? Millions of them must be snapped and shared each year, as inducement or harassment, celebration or shaming. Perhaps Harper’s Index could tell us the tonnage of coal mined each year to power the transmission of American crotches. So when a dick pic turns up…
Bryan Cranston parades through Trumbo, a wiki-pageant of shorthand history, like he’s a costumed kid playing Actor Bryan Cranston at a Disney park. As blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, a man given to mannered diction, Cranston layers movieland falseness over the scraped-raw heart of his Breaking Bad triumph. Remember how you…
Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, all. We told you Thursday that The Real Housewives franchise is heading to Dallas. Bravo is staying hush-hush on the cast, teasing everything in front of our faces like we are damn dogs begging for a treat. So we took it upon…
We’ve gotten used to the idea that the highest-quality, most innovative television lives on premium cable channels like HBO and Showtime. But two of the most delightful and inventive series to premiere in the past year have come from an unexpected place: the CW. Jane the Virgin and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend…
The drama is so big in Texas! Prepare yourself, Dallas. Everything is about to get more ignorant up in here. Bravo announced two new Real Housewives cities and Dallas is one of them. “The Real Housewives of Dallas follows a group of sophisticated southern socialites, as they claw their way…
Here’s a sentence you didn’t expect to read today: There’s a recent Simpsons that’s entirely worth your time. Seriously. “Halloween of Horror,” the fourth episode of the series’ 27th season, is a rarity: a late-era Simpsons rich with feeling, sharp jokes and the sense that this family and their story…
How do you dramatize the unthinkable? On August 5, 2010, 33 Chilean miners were trapped when the 100-year-old gold and copper mine in which they were working collapsed around them. For weeks, no one knew if they were alive or dead. But 69 days later, after a team of international…
It’s clear why Angelina Jolie Pitt became a star. She was a sexpot with talent, and, just as crucially, her feline beauty was a sexpot breed we’d never seen. Past glamazons like Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardner and Jayne Mansfield trailed a whiff of insecurity. We could sense that they were…
Newspapers are dead, except in the hearts of anyone who has ever loved them — which means there are still narrow slivers of hope. One of them now comes to us in the form of a movie: Tom McCarthy’s bold, shirtsleeve-sturdy newsroom drama Spotlight, which shows how a team of…
In its very first scene, Aziz Ansari’s new Netflix series, Master of None, presents something never before seen on TV: an Asian-American male romantic lead at the center of his own series. Granted, that scene is hardly sexy: A broken condom puts the brakes on a bar hook-up between Dev…
