In Top of the Lake, Peggy Olson Goes to Hell

Elisabeth Moss’s face is far from the only reason to savor Top of the Lake, Jane Campion’s smart, bracing, hugely enjoyable mystery rural noir Top of the Lake, which premieres on the Sundance Channel on Monday, March 18. But that pale-to-radiant instrument of hers—a mouth that suggests her characters might…

Bronx Bombers

For a movie as much in love with New York’s outer-borough street life as Adam Leon’s Gimme the Loot, it will not do just to talk about the film. That’s what Leon insists, and so I find myself heading north with Leon on FDR Drive on an overcast Friday afternoon,…

Harmony Korine Explains the “Beauty in Horror” of Spring Break

To most of the world, spring break seems like a lot of fun, but people who live in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, or South Padre Island understand the dark side. Damn college kids pass through for a week to drink liquor, trash the streets, and wear T-shirts announcing, “I survived spring…

Other Ozzes, Great and Terrible (But Mostly Terrible)

Twenty minutes into the first full-length movie based on L. Frank Baum’s most beloved novel, a duck pukes into the face of Larry Semon, the star and director. Semon’s 1925 flop, titled The Wizard of Oz, opens and closes with a Geppetto-esque toymaker reading to his granddaughter from a well-loved…

James Franco’s Oz is Neither Great Nor Powerful

It’s a bad omen when, early on in Oz the Great and Powerful, we learn that the full given name of its wizard is Oscar. That, of course, is also the name of the awards ceremony that star James Franco once presided over as calamitously as he does this sagging…

How the Bastards Win: A Greedy Lying Bastards Review

We can speak of climate change with a fair amount of certitude: shrinking Arctic ice cover, rising global temperatures and increased frequency of extreme weather events. Most of us acknowledge that things are getting worse faster than previously predicted, and that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions have likely played a major…

Girls, Season 2 Episode 8: Who’s Bringing the Cookies?

As episode eight opens, we follow Hannah down the street. She receives a text from Adam, which causes her to have a nervous tic, one we’ve never seen before. We’re reminded Hannah got an e-book deal, and the deadline is looming, with nary a word written. Hannah starts doing everything…

Why There are So Few Great Marriage Movies

There’s a reason, beyond basic Judd Apatow oversaturation, that hardly anyone went to see his mewl of middle-aged despair This Is 40. A movie about a marriage already in progress — as opposed to one about a marriage just waiting to happen, the province of the romantic comedy — is…

Jack the Giant Slayer Is Fee-Fi-Fo-Fun

To paraphrase Stephen Sondheim, there are big, tall, terrible, fleshy, bulbous-headed giants in the sky in Jack the Giant Slayer. And what would a big-budget, mildly revisionist, 3-D spin on “Jack and the Beanstalk” be if those fearsome beasties didn’t somehow make it down to sea level, where a storybook…