Here’s what Patrick Hughes’ The Hitman’s Bodyguard has going for it: It’s exactly the movie it promises to be, but more so. It’s more wild, more hilarious, more giddily irresponsible — it’s the hard R action comedy that kids sneaking into it might imagine it’s going to be, minus ’70s…
Get schwifty.
We sat down with its stars Blessin Giraldo, Cori Grainger, and Tayla Solomon.
In the 1980s, four-quadrant studio comedies (i.e. for the whole family) peddled in relentlessly dark premises that directors then brightened up with wholesomeness: Three Men and a Baby features an orphaned infant who is mistakenly given away to drug dealers; Ghostbusters boasts multiple fatalities at the hands of an accountant…
The dictates of Hollywood screenwriting can’t quite constrain the wildness of Jeannette Walls’ family and her best-selling memoir. Despite a tidy resolution, too many scenes whose shapes are immediately familiar from other movies, and an absurd climax that dramatizes the conflict between a daughter and her father through the wheezy…
Taylor Sheridan isn’t afraid to embrace genre. His Wind River plays more like an unusually well-made episode of CSI: Wyoming than the highly anticipated directorial effort from the screenwriter of Hell or High Water (which may well have been last year’s best-written film). Set in the desolate, snow-covered Wind River…
Rick and Morty airs on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. Here’s a great joke. An unhappy married couple get the chance to view, through the goggles of a dimension-hopping mad scientist, how their lives have played out in an alternate reality. The husband, an insecure drip, goes first. Turns out in…
Yes, you’ve heard it’s bad. It is. But there are some things to like in The Dark Tower, directed by Nikolaj Arcel, the new adaptation of Stephen King’s epic novel series. Just as in the books, an evil sorcerer named The Man in Black (Matthew McConaughey) orders around his henchpeople…
At 88 years young, the rebel-shaman filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky has led an eclectic life and enjoyed a provocative career not easily encapsulated. His 1970 acid western, El Topo, crowned him godfather of the midnight-movie craze. His phantasmagoric 1973 masterpiece, The Holy Mountain, was ripped off by Kanye West for the…
It’s hard to imagine a less promising film title than An Inconvenient Sequel. Maybe Another Imposition Upon Your Time? It’s clear, in the opening minutes, as we watch him shake off the slights and smears of his critics, that Al Gore is too savvily upbeat a technocrat to give the…
Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up has pretty much the greatest, most legendary fuck-you ending in all of cinema history: an imaginary tennis match between two mimes to conclude an oblique murder mystery. Somehow, it’s also an ideal finale to this most hypnotic parable of alienation — and a perfect example of Antonioni’s…
It’s August, which means it’s even hotter than July and you need TV now more than ever! The planet is hot, but you watching TV in your underwear with a fan pointed directly at your swimsuit parts is even hotter! Have at it! Manhunt: Unabomber, Aug. 1 (Discovery) Essentially, this…
I sincerely hope that there’s a five-hour cut of Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit somewhere, a version with cleaner through-lines, deeper characterizations and a more organic narrative. But the version that we have right now — a messy, troubling beast clocking in at around 150 minutes — is riveting in its own…
Comrade Detective premieres on Amazon Prime August 4. Castlevania streams on Netflix. Only slowly does it become clear that Comrade Detective, a star-driven meta-prank cop-show curio, isn’t supposed to suck. This fact hit me early in the second episode, a full hour into this squirmiest of prestige streaming series, when…
Icarus premieres August 4 on Netflix. Give Putin this: The man knows how to deny his government’s elaborate, outrageous conspiracies violating international laws and norms. To this day, despite the 37 medals that have been stripped from his nation’s Olympians, Putin insists that Russia never engaged in a longrunning campaign…
At 5 p.m. Thursday, I became one of the first people in this country to see The Emoji Movie a second time. (Aside, obviously, from the folks who made it — though I’m not entirely sure that some of them actually bothered to see it all the way through once.)…
Officially, the brutish thriller Atomic Blonde takes place in Berlin just before and after the toppling of the Wall, in early November 1989. But this seismic event is really just a backdrop for another epochal marker: the decade that saw the birth of MTV and the height of New German…
The Incredible Jessica James premieres July 28 on Netflix. Sometimes critics and filmmakers agree. We suggested, in our 2015 review of People Places Things, that writer-director James Strouse should please give more screen time to supporting actor Jessica Williams. Now, in his new rom-com for Netflix, The Incredible Jessica James,…
The Last Tycoon premieres July 28 on Amazon Prime. Here’s how a fan magazine might profile the hero of The Last Tycoon (Amazon), played by Matt Bomer. His name belongs in marquees, but he deserves a place somewhere higher. Monroe Stahr toils as an angel on Earth, making dreams come…
What might be most horrific about the horrors exposed in Matthew Heineman’s overwhelming City of Ghosts is their familiarity. The film documents the efforts of citizen journalists to alert the world to ISIS’s ravaging of Raqqa, their Syrian hometown, which Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi and his extremist followers seized four years…
Jenny Slate’s laughter comes out in a wild gush, as though she’s been shaken and uncorked, the sound somehow puppyishly sweet and punkishly impolite. Her characters, cheery cynics, often fail to quite match the mood of a room, so their amused eruptions can hurt feelings, stir bafflement, inspire the ol’…
Insecure returns July 23 on HBO No moment captures the elations of HBO’s Insecure better than the opening scene of the sophomore season’s second episode. The morning after sleeping with her ex-boyfriend, Issa (Issa Rae) recounts her confusion about the abrupt quickie to her snappish best friend, Molly (Yvonne Orji)…
