Political drama has long been shaped by what we can call the conversion narrative. In a play like One Third of a Nation, one of the Living Newspaper extravaganzas mounted with New Deal funding by the Federal Theatre Project, an everyman Joe you just gotta root for tries to live…
Because women are particularly beguiling when viewed from behind, the camera loves to follow them: Anyone who’s watched James Stewart’s lovesick detective trailing Kim Novak, a platinum dream poured into a pale gray flannel hourglass, understands the voyeurism at the heart of Vertigo. With Spectre — the 24th James Bond…
The Muppets doesn’t work, exactly, but I’m still watching. As a relative outsider to the 60-year Muppets franchise, I’ve long suspected that early imprinting is the key to loving Jim Henson’s gaudy, unblinking rags. I’ve never felt a particular need to watch pieces of felt tell Borscht Belt–style jokes, and…
Oscar-nominated, acclaimed cult filmmaker Whit Stillman is still coming to the Texas Theatre in celebration for the 25th anniversary of his first feature, Metropolitan. Metropolitan wasn’t the immediate success that I — and perhaps you, too — might’ve assumed. It premiered at Sundance, garnered an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay, and…
Lenny Abrahamson’s shattering drama Room borrows its fictional plot from the tabloids and strips it of sensationalism. Seven years ago, a man (Sean Bridgers) snatched 17-year-old Joy (Brie Larson) and stashed her in his backyard shed. Two years later, she bore their son. The door stayed locked. Now 5, Jack…
The most effective scene in James Vanderbilt’s brisk, outraged Truth is one that will be familiar to anyone who has ever sat in a room where editors and reporters are breaking down an investigative story. The reporters — here, 60 Minutes researchers played by Dennis Quaid, Elisabeth Moss and Topher…
David Gordon Green’s Our Brand Is Crisis is a horror film wrapped in fast-talking political comedy. Watching Sandra Bullock, as ruthless campaign manager Jane, flog her uncharismatic candidate for Bolivia’s next president, I snickered at her knowing quips. Asked by an offscreen TV interviewer (the film’s awkward framing device) to…
Before Anthony Bourdain published Kitchen Confidential in 2000, mere mortals who simply eat in restaurants had little idea about the drinking, debauchery and drug use rampant among the folks responsible for getting their fettuccine Alfredo to the table. The book was eye-opening if true, and a rambunctious, vicarious pleasure even…
Sure, you can blame the aliens, the gophers, the monkeys and the fridge. But even without all those, 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Harrumphing of the Whatsit likely wouldn’t have worked. Its director, you see, no longer finds it edifying to dream up new ways to kill America’s historical enemies…
In his 2014 book Difficult Men, journalist Brett Martin identifies bad-boy antiheroes as the defining feature of our current “Golden Age” of television. Tony Soprano, Don Draper and The Wire’s Omar Little dazzle with their multifaceted complexity: How deep the furrow in Tony’s troubled brow! How pensive the trail of…
Dear Movie Theater Patrons on Their Phones (re: Crimson Peak), A few months ago, I got new contact lenses. The doctor strengthened my prescription, and now I can pretty much count the stars on the American flag on the moon. It’s pretty intense. There’s a raisin on the floor over…
Here’s a hair-raising assignment: Imagine you’re tasked with capturing the social and psychological complexities of a nation’s crackup within the framework of popular moviemaking. What if Gone With the Wind tried, in its swooning romance, to explicate Scarlett O’Hara’s slow-to-dawn realization of the hopeless immorality of the world she has…
Quick! Name the movie where Bill Murray plays a proudly shabby dude who acts like a prick for an hour and then, for reasons of narrative convention rather than character-based truth, shambles toward either heroism or some vague be-nicer enlightenment. Maybe a tougher challenge would be to name the Bill…
The last time RAW, the company’s long-running episodic television program set foot inside the AAC this past January, longtime WCW stalwart Sting made his first public appearance on WWE TV. Daniel Bryan – though hurt again and unsure when the company’s medical staff will clear him – wrestled his first…
In 1969, the late, always unpredictable and wacky actor Dennis established himself in the Hollywood system as “Billy” in his co-writing / directed debut, Easy Rider. This rebellious film set the mood for Hopper and the often wild card of roles and projects he would take on for the remainder…
Twenty-year-old Josh’s (Josh Thomas) world explodes twice in the Please Like Me pilot: first when he realizes he’s gay and again when his bipolar mother, Rose (Debra Lawrance), attempts suicide. Josh takes both revelations in stride, though he dreads having to inform his mom, whom he’ll be living with and…
Here’s a scary story for you. Somewhere in Hollywood, a cabal of producers are forever zombie-ing up the corpses of long-dead licensed properties, ever hopeful that you will continue to throw your money at familiar trademarked characters even as they eat your brains. Sometimes, when a silver moon shines just…
In the Golden Age of scripted television, reality TV is supposed to be dying, but you wouldn’t know it from Survivor’s tenacious resilience — or its just-debuted 31st season. The show that launched reality TV as mainstream programming at the turn of the millennium returned two weeks ago with an…
Michael Shannon isn’t a stickler for rules. In his career, he’s ignored most of them, especially the mandate that a theater-trained, Oscar-nominated actor should shun the large roles in dumb movies that let him afford the smart ones. (See: Kangaroo Jack, Bad Boys II, Premium Rush, Man of Steel.) Shannon’s…
Steven Spielberg’s true-story Cold War procedural Bridge of Spies has a wintry chill. The colors are gray and green, the skin tones pale as frozen fish, and the film stock fuzzed and snowy. Our protagonist, James Donovan (Tom Hanks), spends half the movie waylaid by a cold and takes his…
Aaron Sorkin opens up a new desktop icon with Steve Jobs, a briskly busy, talkative companion piece to the Newsroom and Moneyball writer’s Mark Zuckerberg-centric The Social Network. Adapting Walter Isaacson’s biography of the Apple innovator, Sorkin’s latest is less a novel exposé than a distinctly Sorkinian dramatization of well-known…
Mia Wasikowska is proof of reincarnation. The Australian actress must be possessed by the spirit of Lillian Gish. At 22 — the same age that Gish starred in Birth of a Nation — Wasikowska became a bankable name playing the lead in Tim Burton’s garish Alice in Wonderland. In the…
