In his latest family portrait, Our Little Sister, Hirokazu Kore-eda chronicles roughly a year in the life of the Koda clan — or what’s left of it. When, years ago, her father left for another woman and their mother subsequently abandoned the family to live her own life, Sachi (Haruka…
“The world changed when Superman flew across the sky,” Viola Davis’ Amanda Waller says early on in Suicide Squad. “And then it changed again when he didn’t,” she continues, over somber images of the Man of Steel’s funeral following his (non-)death at the end of Batman v. Superman. Luckily, that…
Just over a minute into the third season of the Netflix animated comedy BoJack Horseman, an entertainment-news interviewer asks our hero, “What would an Oscar nomination mean for BoJack Horseman?” The rest of the season is dedicated to answering that question, tracking BoJack (voiced by Will Arnett) from press junkets…
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, published in 1943, might stand as a children’s classic, but it’s not-so-secretly a story for grown-ups. Kids have long been drawn to the book’s dreamy sense of wonder, to the golden-haired star-child of the title, but Saint-Exupéry’s ruminations on regret, solitude and loss belong…
You can have your houses of cards, your Jessica Joneses, your wet hot American summers. The Netflix original with its finger firmest on the pulse of our fraught current moment? It comes from Germany, comprises three feature-length “episodes,” and commences its tale more than a quarter-century ago. NSU: Germany History…
With unflagging honesty and compassion, Clay Tweel’s documentary Gleason charts the journey of former New Orleans Saints safety Steve Gleason as he copes with the ruinous nerve disease ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease. That description, however, can’t quite do justice to Tweel’s film, which is partly built around video journals…
A more appropriate title for Jason Bourne might be Walking: The Motion Picture. This fifth entry in the franchise loosely (very loosely) based on Robert Ludlum’s best-selling novels brings back director Paul Greengrass and star Matt Damon to continue the tale of the good soldier-turned-amnesiac-assassin-turned-rogue agent doing battle against his…
The ludicrous but amusing teen social-media thriller Nerve is committed to pinning its characters into a world we understand as ours. It opens with Skype, Spotify, Gmail and Chrome, all on the MacBook screen of a mousily beautiful teen, Vee (Emma Roberts), who you just know is one horrific adventure…
Jack Pettibone Riccobono’s The Seventh Fire opens on dark, grainy footage of a highway at dusk before cutting to an overhead shot of a long stretch of forest, and then to two Native American men in a canoe, harvesting worms from a quiet lake. They take the worms home, where…
Alec Baldwin is no Steve Harvey. Unlike Harvey, Baldwin seems diminished on the set of a retro ’70s game show dedicated to getting contestants to say gently dirty nonsense. On ABC’s baggy, boozy Match Game, Baldwin crabs into a skinny last-century microphone about how everything’s stupid: his celebrity panelists, the…
Writer Keith Gessen once said that Philip Roth wasn’t a misogynist and didn’t hate women because he spent all his time “thinking about fucking them.” But he did concede that Roth probably thought “women were a foreign country.” In James Schamus’ debut feature Indignation, an adaptation of a late Roth…
Anna Gunn actually gets to do things in Meera Menon’s expansive high-finance drama Equity, which is almost reason enough to recommend it right there. The Breaking Bad co-star tears into the role of a rainmaking banker taking a Silicon Valley company public. For once it’s Gunn whose character gets to…
Café Society is surprisingly ambitious by the standards of late-period Woody Allen — a veritable epic taking in a broad swath of a young man’s life and charting his progress from wide-eyed innocent to cold, confident operator. But that’s also why the film, in some senses, could only have been…
Like the real 1980s, Stranger Things gets more unsettling as it goes. The opening episode of the Netflix show, created by the Duffer Brothers, gives us swear-y, scruffy kids playing D&D and then, beneath a lavish suburban starscape, encountering the unknown — which one of the boys promptly hides in…
Star Trek Beyond might be the Star Trekkiest film of the new, J.J. Abrams-ified Trek era. That is to say, it’s the one that feels the most like a turbo-loaded episode of the original series, and has at least some of that classic spirit of exploration and derring-do. That’s not…
To understand what Absolutely Fabulous (first a TV show and now a movie) means to Brits, you’d have to go back to the TV premiere in 1992. Margaret Thatcher had their economy in a stranglehold until her departure as Prime Minister two years earlier, and when every sensible citizen was…
Does it matter that Freddy Krueger was a pedophilic middle-school janitor who died in a blazing fire when parents sought revenge? No. And unless you’re a horror-film obsessive, you probably don’t even know how he morphed into a pizza-faced Where’s Waldo with knife fingers — what matters is he lives…
Twenty-five years ago, Annie Leibovitz stunned America with her infamous portrait of Demi Moore — nude, bronzed, seven months pregnant — on the cover of Vanity Fair. The image of Moore’s proud, bare body, heavy with child and unmistakably erotic, meant that in some states the magazine had to be…
A while back I cracked a dumb joke about all our presidential candidates being corrupt. My wife hit back with this: “You’re a JibJab!” She referred, of course, to the animated viral sensations of America circa 2005 or 2008, the once wildly popular political-parody videos that, in the interest of…
In the world of Difficult People, the cutting comedy returning this week to Hulu, the game is rigged against Julie (Julie Klausner) and Billy (Billy Eichner), but perhaps only because they rigged it against themselves. As their friends find success, the two struggling comedians feign interest in jobs that pay…
Steve Allen didn’t know what to make of Frank Zappa. The clean-cut young musician was promising to “play the bicycle” on the set of The Steve Allen Show in 1963, spinning the wheels and tapping on the spokes. The result, with the help of a tuneless orchestra behind him and…
Bob Mazur, in his bestselling memoir, sounds like any of us when we shift careers, writing that he wanted something that “kept my interest, that didn’t box me into the same boring routine.” The only difference is that Mazur didn’t break the box quitting an ad job to launch a…
