It was two weeks before Salma Hayek’s 49th birthday when Mike White told her he was finally going to write that script about the dinner party, the one he’d promised her almost a year earlier. The screenplay would be loosely inspired by a real-life dinner the two had attended, but…
The Book of Henry really wants us to believe that its 12-year-old title character (Jaeden Lieberher) is the smartest kid on Earth. Well, in many ways, he is. He’s a rational, logical thinker who knows how to play the stock market. He handles his family’s finances and works on cute,…
At least Rough Night, Lucia Aniello’s dutifully raucous new bachelorette-party comedy, achieves verisimilitude. It’s a rough watch and an evening killer, this film about friends who seem not to love, like or even really know one another. If you enjoy strained fun with people who have grown apart from you,…
A film often smartly attuned to language, Beatriz at Dinner — a sober comedy about class clash and soft-to-hard racism directed by Miguel Arteta and written by Mike White — operates in several different idioms. English and Spanish (sometimes unsubtitled) are spoken, as are the lexicons of healing and affluence…
It’s only after three encounters, a night on molly, a blow-up argument, an impassioned recitation of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “First Fig,” and some tender May-December — late December — sex that Sam Elliott’s The Hero character can be bothered to ask what Laura Prepon’s does for a living. Turns…
Lucia Aniello’s ensemble comedy Rough Night might look, from its marketing, like a gender-flipped Very Bad Things. Both comedies feature a pre-wedding party that goes off the rails when a stripper accidentally gets killed by the rowdiest member of the crew. But Aniello’s film — which stars Scarlett Johansson, Zoë…
Here’s something I never guessed I would say: It might be worth going into the new Cars movie spoiler-free. Without giving anything away, I can tell you that, at its climax, this latest installment in a springtime of sequels the world doesn’t need eases into a surprising new gear and…
Over the years, Tom Cruise has been many things, but he’s almost never been marginalized — not in one of his own movies. Oh, he’s played supporting parts and done cameos here and there, but even in those smaller roles (in films like Tropic Thunder or Rock of Ages), he…
Fans of The Bachelorette who showed up to Sundown at Granada on Monday to watch the latest episode of Rachel Lindsay’s quest for love got to watch more than that. Toward the end of the show, Lindsay, a Dallas native, walked out onto the rooftop patio. “Everyone cheered — we…
Since last November, we’ve been asked to understand, if not necessarily sympathize with, the furious resentments of the racists, misogynists, homophobes and plutocrats who have brought us to this point of political calamity. The fifth season of Orange Is the New Black (Netflix) appears to be its own kind of…
Megan Leavey is a war picture, but the scenes of combat, while suitably tense, are not its selling point. Instead, the film, based on a true story, follows aimless young Leavey (Kate Mara), who in 2003 leaves home to become a Marine. Director Gabriela Cowperthwaite condenses the scenes of boot…
A red door is, biblically speaking, a sign of protection, an echo of the blood rubbed on posts and lintels during Passover to keep God from smiting you and your home. But like most things that the Bible insists are positive, the red door also comes with an undercurrent of…
The Oak Cliff Film Festival crew is sitting in the back of Wild Detectives, bantering over the recent uptick in interest for slow-core Soviet cinema. They just showed Tarkovsky’s Stalker, a challenging piece of stitched-up long shots, and each has theories on why the crowds were so large. One thing…
The trailer for Henry Koster’s 1952 adaptation of My Cousin Rachel channels hysteria as the voiceover asks, “Was she woman or witch? Madonna or murderess?” Unfortunately, the film itself proved far tamer than the marketing suggested. The novel’s author, Daphne du Maurier, who also penned The Birds and the psychological…
The 2017 Cannes Film Festival wrapped up last Sunday with a slate of generally predictable (and perfectly worthwhile) awards. And while it may have been a somewhat lackluster year for the festival’s main competition, there were plenty of cinematic treasures to be found on the Croisette – even a couple…
It’s summer! Time to stay inside and watch TV! Duh! I’m Dying Up Here (Showtime), June 4 Peak TV giveth, and Peak TV taketh away. And sometimes Peak TV confuses the shit outta ye. Case in point: this new drama about LA’s stand-up comedy scene in the ’70s. I mean,…
For some reason, I can’t bring myself to hate Jim Brockmire. Played by comedian Hank Azaria, best known for his voice work on The Simpsons, Brockmire wears a perpetually wounded and somewhat confused expression, the look of a man coming off a bender who can’t find his car. His loud,…
I’m Dying Up Here premieres June 4 on Showtime Mythologies are built on pain. It’s why nations remember the invasions they’ve suffered better than the ones they’ve perpetrated, why religions celebrate their martyrs, and why Disney princesses – among the most privileged individuals in their respective kingdoms – sing about…
Imagine a remake of Cape Fear shot like Kubrick’s The Shining, with Max Cady recast as a child, and you’ll have some idea of the strangeness of Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer. The film has quickly proved to be one of the most divisive titles at this…
With his bow-legged power-walk, low-boil narcissism and tough-guy snarl, Brad Pitt is the comic ghost in David Michod’s all-too-real War Machine. The film, which is premiering on Netflix this week (and also getting an extremely limited theatrical release), was inspired by the late Michael Hastings’s book The Operators: The Wild…
Solid rule of thumb: Never accept strawberries from strangers on the street, no matter how good-looking the fruit or well-spoken the unknown person. But maybe that’s just me. For Clare (Teresa Palmer), the intrepid Australian backpacker who in Berlin Syndrome finds herself imprisoned in a Berlin apartment by a romantic…
There will always be, it’s become clear, one more Winston Churchill story to tell: one more slant on a weekend, a summer, a year in the life of the 20th century’s most formidable leader, a man whose history includes two world wars and speeches so glorious that future dramatizations were…
