A couple years into his supposed retirement, the 80-year-old Ken Loach showed up at Cannes with I, Daniel Blake and proceeded to win the Palme d’Or (his second, after 2006’s The Wind that Shakes the Barley). The film follows an aging carpenter (Dave Johns) with a heart problem and a…
What will become of Zion? No, not the loosely defined term for a Jewish homeland in the Middle East, but a mild-mannered and fundamentally righteous shopkeeper living in Jerusalem and pulled between conservative religious forces and modernity. (Oh, so maybe I do mean the Jewish homeland in the Middle East.)…
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 the Bible insists are positive, the red door also comes with an undercurrent of horror…
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…
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…
I’m Dying Up Here premiered 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…
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,…
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…
In 2015, House of Cards’ fourth season had President Francis Underwood (Kevin Spacey) confessing a murder to his secretary of state, ICO (the series’ fictional ISIS) beheading a guy on live TV, lone journalist Tom Hammerschmidt (Boris McGiver) dogging the president with corruption charges, data scientist Aidan MacAllan (Damian Young)…
Cooper and Cohen are in Phoenix this week for their show, AC2.
Its 22 minutes are taken up with archival TV news footage and filmed speeches.
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…
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…
Perhaps Wonder Woman’s greatest superpower is enduring for the past 75 years as a wildly unstable signifier. Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman, starring Gal Gadot in the title role, further adds to this complicated, contradictory cluster of signs and symbols. Forged from deeply feminist sympathies, the character debuted in All Star…
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,…
“He was a very un-British, emotional man.”
“I can’t ensure I will not be disappeared in the future,” Joshua Wong says, deep into Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower, Joe Piscatella’s rousing, terrifying thriller of a documentary. He says it a little distractedly, as though his own life is an afterthought when considered against the scope of his movement…
In the run-up to this year’s festival, Bong Joon-ho’s Okja was one of the most mysterious titles in the Official Selection lineup. Now that people have seen it, Okja has turned out to be…one of the most mysterious titles in the Official Selection lineup. What is it, exactly? A children’s…
Baywatch kinda baffled me. This R-rated comedy adaptation of the cheesy but sincere beach-set action series — which somehow became a worldwide phenomenon in the 1990s — is a movie that should be as enjoyably ridiculous as its source material. In some instances, it is. Director Seth Gordon (Horrible Bosses)…
In Robin Swicord’s Wakefield, an adaptation of the late E.L. Doctorow’s short story of the same name, disillusioned lawyer Howard Wakefield (Bryan Cranston) chases a raccoon from his decrepit backhouse and … never returns. The story’s not science fiction; Howard doesn’t get swallowed by a black hole. He’s still among…
Don’t expect Amir Bar-Lev’s Long Strange Trip, a sweeping if not very penetrating look at the 30-year career of the Grateful Dead, to offer major revelations. For any Deadhead — and it’s hard to imagine any other kind of viewer settling in for the four-hour running time — the basic…
Yes, dead men tell no tales — but neither, really, do the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Rather than stories, the series, of which this 2017 entry is the fifth, offers an unpalatable mix of mincing slapstick, rote derring-do, ponderous CGI, whiskery sea-chanty mysticism, and dutiful action sequences whose only…
