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…
Super Bowl Sunday morning, I was in a friend’s kitchen with her young daughter and a tin of watercolor pencils. The girl dipped a red one in the water, didn’t wait for a wet brush to trace the strokes after drawing first. Catching a strange word, the daughter asked an…
We’ve all been there. You finally get around to watching this year’s nominees, and you think, “Didn’t I see pretty much this same Oscar-bait movie last year?” You probably did, thanks to the McKee/Weinstein-driven formula behind most Best Picture noms. You can even build your own! Just mix and match…
If you’ve wondered just why Hollywood now so aggressively courts Chinese viewers, look no further than The Mermaid. In just two weeks of release, Stephen Chow’s fantastical comedy has already brought in $430 million in its home country, making it China’s highest-grossing release ever. (It’s doing well here, too, having…
In the Winter Olympics, ski jumping is one of those sports — bobsledding and luging are others — where Joe and Jane Satellite Dish cannot tell the difference between a great performance and a terrible one unless the athlete is carried away on a stretcher. No doubt there are crucial…
Bad cop movies — whether bad movies about cops or movies about bad cops — can be like those Arctic core samples from which scientists determine long-gone CO2 levels, though in this case they’re measuring American anxiety about police authority. Pop on John Hillcoat’s agonized pulp thriller Triple 9 in…
The eighth episode of this season of The Bachelor aired last night, which for every season means the chosen Bachelor visits his remaining ladies’ hometowns, which means he probably meets an over-protective father and possibly too-drunk-for-TV mother. Last night was no different. The ladies paraded Bachelor Ben around their hometowns…
In a September interview with GQ, Constance Wu, star of NBC’s Fresh Off the Boat, observed of the HBO series Togetherness, “It’s a show about white people.” She’s not wrong: Created by indie-film luminaries Jay and Mark Duplass, along with the actor Steve Zissis, Togetherness is a low-key look at…
The centerpiece of Hail, Caesar!’s mid-century Hollywood satire is the eponymous film-within-a-film itself, an overwrought biblical epic in which a skeptical Roman centurion played by George Clooney has a literal come-to-Jesus moment. Risen, whose plot can be described in exactly the same way, never inspires one of its own. Co-writer/director…
There is precisely one attempted coup de cinema in the Jesse Owens biopic Race, which otherwise defaults to the backlot handsomeness of other Great Men tributes from Hollywood. In 1935, Owens (Stephan James), a freshman sensation on the Ohio State University track team, returns to the locker room after practice…
Benicio Del Toro has the basset-hound look of a beast you can trust — or, at least, he’ll happily admit when he’s lying. He’s the right man for a rotten world, with heavy-lidded, handsome eyes made for giving any tough spot an appraising squint. Recently, he’s played a string of…
A laugh comes at last just before the end credits of Robert Eggers’ lit-class horror-bummer The Witch: a boastful note attesting to the documentary truthfulness of the dialogue in the movie we’ve just seen. Over 90 minutes that prove shriekiness is no impediment to ponderousness, we’ve beheld the harrowing of…
Listen: James Franco has come unstuck in time. In the TV-MA debut (there are many, many excellent F-bombs) of 11.22.63, the Hulu miniseries partly shot in Dallas, James Franco is bouncing back and forth between present day and 11:58 a.m. on October 21, 1960. Chris Cooper is there, coughing. A…
On the surface, there isn’t much to object to in How to Be Single. Look, it says! No matter how fabulous their lives may seem, everyone wants to be happier and more fulfilled. Everyone is looking for something more, just like you! And really, Christian Ditter’s film (based on the…
Marie Reyes opens her front door to her Preston Hollow home and welcomes her 10-year-old daughter home from school. “Hey, there. How was your early Valentine’s Day?” Sofia, who was picked up from school by the family’s housekeeper, trots in wearing her Hockaday School uniform and carrying her Valentines. A…
The first Zoolander, Ben Stiller’s dopey, fitfully funny fashion spoof, was released less than three weeks after the September 11 attacks. Its sequel shows the extent to which another kind of nefarious plot — the cynical quest for world domination through cross-brand synergy — has proven impossible to eradicate on…
HBO’s Vinyl is the latest in a series of cultural hard-ons for the rough-and-tumble world of pre-Koch NYC: From novels like Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers and Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire to online photo galleries of graffiti-splattered subway trains and can-you-believe-this-juice-bar-used-to-be-a-crack-den slideshows, there’s a hunger for what Manhattan looked,…
