Rick and Morty airs on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim Here’s a great joke. An unhappy married couple get the chance to view, through the goggles of a dimension-hopping mad scientist, how their lives have played out in an alternate reality. The husband, an insecure drip, goes first. Turns out in…
In the 1980s, four-quadrant studio comedies (i.e. for the whole family) peddled in relentlessly dark premises that directors then brightened up with wholesomeness: Three Men and a Baby features an orphaned infant who is mistakenly given away to drug dealers; Ghostbusters boasts multiple fatalities at the hands of an accountant…
Taylor Sheridan isn’t afraid to embrace genre. His Wind River plays more like an unusually well-made episode of CSI: Wyoming than the highly anticipated directorial effort from the screenwriter of Hell or High Water (which may well have been last year’s best-written film). Set in the desolate, snow-covered Wind River…
There is a better, more touching movie hidden somewhere inside The Only Living Boy in New York, and you can often see it creeping in around the edges. It’s not to be found in the somewhat empty coming-of-age narrative at the film’s center, which follows Thomas (Callum Turner), a precocious,…
Yes, you’ve heard it’s bad. It is. But there are some things to like in The Dark Tower, directed by Nikolaj Arcel, the new adaptation of Stephen King’s epic novel series. Just as in the books, an evil sorcerer named The Man in Black (Matthew McConaughey) orders around his henchpeople…
The dictates of Hollywood screenwriting can’t quite constrain the wildness of Jeannette Walls’ family and her best-selling memoir. Despite a tidy resolution, too many scenes whose shapes are immediately familiar from other movies, and an absurd climax that dramatizes the conflict between a daughter and her father through the wheezy…
Comrade Detective premieres on Amazon Prime August 4. Castlevania streams on Netflix. Only slowly does it become clear that Comrade Detective, a star-driven meta-prank cop-show curio, isn’t supposed to suck. This fact hit me early in the second episode, a full hour into this squirmiest of prestige streaming series,…
Icarus premieres August 4 on Netflix. Give Putin this: The man knows how to deny his government’s elaborate, outrageous conspiracies violating international laws and norms. To this day, despite the 37 medals that have been stripped from his nation’s Olympians, Putin insists that Russia never engaged in a longrunning campaign…
A white man sits in an observation car and marvels at the hilled vastness of a Dakota. He says he prizes “the therapeutic value of the plains” and that in hard times — like now, as his relationship with his partner seems to be fraying — he returns to that…
I sincerely hope that there’s a five-hour cut of Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit somewhere, a version with cleaner through-lines, deeper characterizations and a more organic narrative. But the version that we have right now — a messy, troubling beast clocking in at around 150 minutes — is riveting in its own…
It’s hard to imagine a less promising film title than An Inconvenient Sequel. Maybe Another Imposition Upon Your Time? It’s clear, in the opening minutes, as we watch him shake off the slights and smears of his critics, that Al Gore is too savvily upbeat a technocrat to give the…
“Our mission is to show the range of voices women have,” Justina Walford says, speaking of round two of the Women Texas Film Festival, which kicks off at Studio Movie Grill on Aug. 16 and runs through the 19th. Short films, long films, weird films and sweet films all will…
It’s August, which means it’s even hotter than July and you need TV now more than ever. Manhunt: Unabomber, Aug. 1 (Discovery) Essentially, this is American Crime Story: Unabomber. It’s an eight-episode scripted series about the manhunt to find Ted Kaczynski and will probably be interesting, if only to see…
At 5 p.m. Thursday, I became one of the first people in this country to see The Emoji Movie a second time. (Aside, obviously, from the folks who made it — though I’m not entirely sure that some of them actually bothered to see it all the way through once.)…
The Last Tycoon premieres July 28 on Amazon Prime Here’s how a fan magazine might profile the hero of The Last Tycoon (Amazon), played by Matt Bomer. His name belongs in marquees, but he deserves a place somewhere higher. Monroe Stahr toils as an angel on Earth, making dreams come…
Officially, the brutish thriller Atomic Blonde takes place in Berlin just before and after the toppling of the Wall, in early November 1989. But this seismic event is really just a backdrop for another epochal marker: the decade that saw the birth of MTV and the height of New German…
The Incredible Jessica James premieres July 28 on Netflix Sometimes critics and filmmakers agree. We suggested, in our 2015 review of People Places Things, that writer-director James Strouse should please give more screen time to supporting actor Jessica Williams. Now, in his new rom-com for Netflix, The Incredible Jessica James,…
You can’t expect a storyteller to wring much suspense out of a real-life plot to assassinate Hitler. In the case of Georg Elser, the subject of Oliver Hirschbiegel’s German drama 13 Minutes, the filmmakers must contend not just with the fact that we know Elser’s 1939 bomb won’t end the…
What might be most horrific about the horrors exposed in Matthew Heineman’s overwhelming City of Ghosts is their familiarity. The film documents the efforts of citizen journalists to alert the world to ISIS’s ravaging of Raqqa, their Syrian hometown, which Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi and his extremist followers seized four years…
Jenny Slate’s laughter comes out in a wild gush, as though she’s been shaken and uncorked, the sound somehow puppyishly sweet and punkishly impolite. Her characters, cheery cynics, often fail to quite match the mood of a room, so their amused eruptions can hurt feelings, stir bafflement, inspire the ol’…
Insecure returns July 23 on HBO No moment captures the elations of HBO’s Insecure better than the opening scene of the sophomore season’s second episode. The morning after sleeping with her ex-boyfriend, Issa (Issa Rae) recounts her confusion about the abrupt quickie to her snappish best friend, Molly (Yvonne Orji)…
Kuso premieres on Shudder July 21. It’s nearly impossible to categorize the first feature-length film by Steven Ellison (aka Flying Lotus, the experimental beatmaster, music producer and rapper). Made up of multiple, wildly varied vignettes that intersect and revolve around the theme of a chaotic post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, where every…
