“Every love story is a ghost story,” David Foster Wallace wrote, more than once. That evocative observation is probed in David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, a film that occasionally reaches a similar level of eloquence. Lowery’s fourth feature reunites Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck, the leads of his second, the…
A “feminist” film need not portray all its female characters in a positive light. Women aren’t a monolith of benevolence. Still, a film with multiple female characters who are equal parts sympathetic and sadistic, who face off against one another in a battle of wits and will, exposing some harsh…
Kuso premieres on Shudder July 21. It’s nearly impossible to categorize the first feature-length film by Steven Ellison (a.k.a. Flying Lotus, the experimental beatmaster, music producer and rapper). Made up of multiple, wildly varied vignettes that intersect and revolve around the theme of a chaotic post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, where every…
It must be nice being Luc Besson, stuck at the age of 14 for the past 44 years. Back when I was that age, in the late 1980s, Besson was among my favorite working filmmakers. I adored the earnest wonder of the deep-sea worlds of The Big Blue (1988) and…
Truth in advertising: Girls trip hard during their New Orleans getaway in Girls Trip, which maybe doesn’t need that possessive apostrophe after all. Malcolm D. Lee’s comedy, written by Kenya Barris and Tracy Oliver — the same creative team behind last year’s uneven Barbershop: The Next Cut — pops with…
Ozark premieres on Netflix on Friday, July 21. When Skyler White challenged her husband’s secret fun life of crime on Breaking Bad, the backlash to her drove Anna Gunn to write an op-ed in The New York Times. Gunn revealed that a number of disturbing “hate boards” had often conflated…
The nerve-racking war thriller Dunkirk is the movie Christopher Nolan’s entire career has been building up to, in ways that even he may not have realized. He’s taken the British Expeditionary Force’s 1940 evacuation from France, early in World War II — a moment of heroism-in-defeat that has become an…
You can’t expect a storyteller to wring much suspense out of a real-life plot to assassinate Hitler. In the case of Georg Elser, the subject of Oliver Hirschbiegel’s German drama 13 Minutes, the filmmakers must contend not just with the fact that we know Elser’s 1939 bomb won’t end the…
Jeff Orlowski grew up wanting to be a nature photographer. But like so many in that field, his work now focuses less on capturing Earth’s natural wonders than it does on cataloguing their steady demise. “This is an entire field of professionals who are witnessing firsthand the falling apart of…
To the Bone premiered July 14 on Netflix About 10 minutes into Marti Noxon’s eating-disorder drama, To the Bone, Ellen (Lily Collins) sneaks away from her overbearing stepmom, Susan (Carrie Preston), to chug warm water from a public-bathroom faucet (a trick to fool the body into thinking it’s full so…
Chasing Coral premiered July 14 on Netflix. In February 1995, Charlton Heston called Rush Limbaugh’s radio program to read from Jurassic Park – the book, not the movie. In his best Old Testament boom, Heston declaimed a speech about man’s hubris that Michael Crichton had written for Dr. Ian Malcolm,…
From Game of Thrones to The Handmaid’s Tale, narratives of sexual assault have become particularly common in film and TV lately. But rarely do we think about the filmmakers, actors and crew who make on-screen rapes happen. How do they feel? Are they tired of rape scenes? Or could portraying rape could actually be a positive thing?
The new tech comedy Loaded (AMC) opens seconds before the finalization of the sale of a game app called Cat Factory for £300 million. Confirmation from his bank that his account balance has gone from several hundred quid in the red to David Cameron’s tax bracket propels lead designer Josh…
Somehow, while we were worrying about superheroes and star destroyers and hot rods and whether Captain America could beat up Superman or whatever, the goddamned Planet of the Apes movies became the most vital and resonant big-budget film series in the contemporary movie firmament. And they did it with the…
Maudie is hit-or-miss, but you’ll probably bawl anyway. Its creators have elected to dramatize nothing but the things that traditional narrative features usually botch. The film, directed by Aisling Walsh, surveys the life of a beloved artist, Nova Scotia’s self-taught folk painter Maud Lewis, who produced scores of cheerily primitive…
The pitch for The Big Sick might sound like a tacky weepie you’d have been afraid to watch on TV in the 1990s. But it’s hard to do justice to the balancing act that the creators of this singular comedy have achieved. Based on events in the life of star…
Ever since her feature debut, The Virgin Suicides (1999), a dreamy, diaphanous tale about the mysteries of girlhood, Sofia Coppola has ranked among the finest distillers of mood (especially languor) and milieu. Those qualities abound in The Beguiled, her sixth film, an adaptation of Thomas Cullinan’s Civil War–set novel of…
Hollywood has many more outstanding actors than it does outstanding scripts. That’s the only way to explain Naomi Watts’ career, which launched stateside with a masterful twin performance in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. Even with a pair of Oscar nominations, though, the actress has spent years languishing in Nondescript Mom…
The House on Coco Road premieres on Netflix on June 30 Quick, tell me everything you know about Grenada. If you’re over the age of 35, you can probably remember Ronald Reagan’s thin lips pronouncing the country’s name with a dangerous emphasis on the first two syllables, essentially weaponizing the…
Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver is a remorselessly entertaining, impeccably assembled action-musical in which cars and people defy the laws of physics and common sense. They leap into gunfire and hop over hoods and careen down streets in perfect time to the beats of an unimpeachably cool soundtrack. It’s all absurd,…
Dueling images of Catholic nuns portray either holier-than-thou punishers in habits or hippie types with acoustic guitars, like the postulant Maria in The Sound of Music. Both stereotypes obscure the fact that, in real life, a lot of nuns are just … kind of weird. At one of the many…
I hate July. It’s hot and there’s less TV. Nevertheless, she sweated through her bra and wrote this guide to what’s worth watching. Snowfall (FX), July 5. Justified’s Dave Andron teams up with director John Singleton for a drama about the start of the crack-cocaine epidemic in LA. Andron describes…
