The joke was on me when I first saw My Big Fat Greek Wedding back in 2002: I watched the film at a press screening that also happened to be attended by a large group of older female tourists. While I grimaced through the movie’s obvious gags and not-ready-for-prime-time direction,…
Thunderous, ponderous and occasionally exciting, Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice opens with one of those grim proclamations that the creators of modern superhero movies are so fond of: “There was a time above, a time before,” intones the voice of Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck), over a by-now…
Prestige cable flatters us about the past. It lets us vacation in the backwardness of previous generations, usually while throwing some empathetic side-eye. Gape at Mad Men’s blithe white dudes, each convinced he earned every bit of authority he commands over women and minorities. Or thank Jezebel that we’ve evolved…
Take heart, Newsroom fans. If you were hankering for more scenes of Jeff Daniels standing around talking, you’ll find an unlikely ally in the new young-adult sci-fi sequel Allegiant, the third entry in the Divergent series based on Veronica Roth’s hit novels. Too bad the stuff he’s saying is so…
Drone warfare is a moral gray area, and this movie is on it. Gavin Hood’s Eye in the Sky stands alongside Drones and Good Kill as the cinematic equivalent of online commenters shouting “First!” on a hot topic but not bothering to say anything new or insightful about it. As…
Why is it that little movies about being out of step so often wind up feeling the same? Not long into Michael Showalter’s Hello, My Name Is Doris, a comedy about a misfit frump pining for a much younger hunk, the unlikely target of the heroine’s affections muses to his…
The Pee-wee Productions logo that kicks off the new Netflix film Pee-wee’s Big Holiday trumpets comedian-turned-actor Paul Reubens’ comeback as the formerly ubiquitous man-child. Forget about The Pee-wee Herman Show, Reubens’ fan-service-intensive Broadway extravaganza. Big Holiday (which premieres March 18 on Netflix) plays like an un–self-conscious continuation of the character’s…
For the protagonists of cable dramas, sex and death are twin forces of titillation, pressure valves for frustrated middle-aged men or steely-eyed careerists. That’s also true for the audience of cable dramas, of course, but there’s a reason we eagerly pursue onscreen what often makes us squirm in real life:…
In Jeff Nichols’ gripping domestic thriller Take Shelter, Michael Shannon played a family man convinced that Armageddon was upon us. But even as the character’s visions compelled him to take more and more extreme precautions, the film remained fixed in the world of the real. It was a portrait of…
This patchy comedy about a cossetted, obnoxious gymnast who has slid deep into sloth in the decade or so since her Olympic triumph gets an occasional laugh from the American ills it sends up: jingoism, the sports-industrial complex, home-schooling, fast-food gluttony. The scattershot jabs pepper the flaccid storyline of the…
The Brothers Grimsby is a movie for those who thought Kingsman: The Secret Service didn’t go far enough. If all the exploding heads and anal-sex jokes and creative impalements of Matthew Vaughn’s tongue-in-cheek spy thriller didn’t do it for you, rest assured: This time, we get to see British super-agent…
Turns out that the Walker Stalker Con that hit the Dallas convention center last week was not, in fact, devoted to the city’s favorite TV son, Walker, Texas Ranger. Nope. This con was for the fans of The Walking Dead, who came in whatever the collective noun is for the…
Since 2015’s When Marnie Was There looks to be its final new film for the foreseeable future, it makes sense that Studio Ghibli would circle back around to its beginnings. Isao Takahata’s 1991 Only Yesterday was not Ghibli’s first feature, however; it was preceded by Hayao Miyazaki’s 1986 Castle in…
A legitimate stunner in that word’s truest sense, Colombian director Ciro Guerra’s river-trip Embrace of the Serpent mesmerizes and jacks with you, leaving you not quite certain, at its end, how to go about the rest of your day. The film is beautiful and ferocious, calm and torrential, a plunge…
“Why did you let me film this?” filmmaker Josh Kriegman incredulously asks Anthony Weiner late in Weiner, a documentary about the former New York congressman’s failed 2013 mayoral run. The disgraced candidate doesn’t have a good answer, but the question hangs over this fascinating film, which plays like it started…
In one key way, the kinda-maybe sequel 10 Cloverfield Lane might be the purest example yet of the J.J. Abrams house style. Directed by first-timer Dan Trachtenberg but produced by Abrams (Super 8, Lost, Alias, Cloverfield, etc.) the thriller is yet another of the fannish wunderbrand’s mystery boxes, a genre…
What if Terrence Malick directed an episode of Entourage? Well, we’re about to find out, sort of. In Knight of Cups, the director of Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line and The Tree of Life turns his roaming camera and ruminating voiceovers toward Los Angeles and the movie business,…
The third season of Broad City (Comedy Central) opens with a toilet-centric montage that already feels like one of the year’s TV highlights. At once exuberant, absurd and all-too-real, a split screen reveals besties Ilana (Ilana Glazer) and Abbi (Abbi Jacobson) living their best lives in their respective bathrooms. They…
Two movies, same scenario: Moments before a scheduled execution, just as the blade or gas pellet is set to deliver its fatal blow, the hero bursts into the room and carries the victim to safety. Banter is exchanged: “What took you so long?” “Traffic was a bitch.” “What took you…
Let’s give Gods of Egypt this much: An hour in, a giant cobra crashes and explodes like a bad guy’s car in a dumb movie from the ’70s. That snake, one of two in Alex Proyas’ film, is wide as a locomotive and long as a parade. It’s also straddled…
In Zootopia, animals do a lot of the things that animals in Disney movies usually do: They speak, to begin with; they walk upright and wear funny clothes; they exhibit attitudes that align or ironically misalign with their species’ appearance and reputation; they hold jobs; they experience outsize emotion and…
The title of Glenn Ficarra and John Requa’s strained dark comedy, in which the war in Afghanistan serves as the backdrop to an American woman’s self-actualizing journey, is the military phonetic-alphabet rendering of WTF. The mild Islamophobia and highly questionable casting choices in the film call to mind other texting…
