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…
We’re recapping Difficult People, episode by episode. Come sit with us as we atrophy and wither. “So this is what a gym looks like,” Julie says, scooping her way through a sundae while walking by a rock-climbing wall. So we begin season two of Difficult People in a place designed for…
Here’s a story you might have missed a few weeks back, what with the country collapsing. In late June, at Dallas’ Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center, 30 aspirational souls received burn treatment after walking over hot coals at a Tony Robbins seminar. Robbins, a seize-your-life salesman of granite physique and…
Kindly allow this lengthy aside and conspiracy theorizing: I can’t start my review of Paul Feig’s redo of Ghostbusters without first mentioning the stupefying chaos that attended last Thursday evening’s press screening, the only one of two scheduled a half-hour apart in New York before the movie’s opening. This unprecedented…
Is it possible to sustain a feature in a single interior location with the premise that three outlaws on the run may or may not rape the three women of the house, two of whom are already being molested by their father? I mean, you could. But why the hell…
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…
The futuristic dystopia of the arty sci-fi romance Equals will be familiar to anyone who’s seen the likes of Gattaca, The Island or THX 1138. It’s a cool, rational, lifeless world, blanketed in whites and grays and blues, and peopled with unfeeling faces — a world whose citizens will express…
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…
It’s no secret that some documentary films are either partly or largely staged. Think of Errol Morris’s re-enactments; think of the fake archival footage in Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell; think of documentary granddad Robert Flaherty casting and concocting scenarios for Nanook of the North. That these strategies can also…
Few of us live our lives in widescreen. Instead, the frames in which our days play out tend to be tight and personal, the vistas only occasional. We see what we need to, what’s before us, what we actually inhabit. That truth has long been the source of a distracting…
Viewers complaining that a protagonist isn’t “likable” usually mean something more like “the protagonist doesn’t stir my empathy” — after all, audiences adore cozying up to scripted TV’s fascinating creeps. Winning that empathy demands that writers, directors and actors lay bare their characters’ selves, immersing us in their perspectives, engaging…
Here’s some good news: Netflix is now streaming Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. No other TV show is quite so ambitious or politically deft as star and executive producer Rachel Bloom’s (and co-creator Aline Brosh McKenna’s) darkly comic, whip-smart send-up of romantic comedies. The title alone has turned more than one of my…
Each week, we’re recapping the second season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt episode by episode. Typically, we talk about these episodes in terms of A, B, and C plots based on their prominence in the episode. But that structure surprisingly doesn’t apply to “Kimmy Sees A Sunset!” Each story here has…
Alex Gibney will be ready if the power grids fail. “We have a place in Maine now,” the director says. “We just installed solar panels. We can fish. We have water. With a little bit of Sterno, we’ll probably be okay.” After a long career dredging up the dark side…
On both an emotional and narrative level, a Hirokazu Kore-eda film pulls you in slowly, almost unexpectedly. The acclaimed Japanese director, whose works include After Life (1998), Still Walking (2008), and Like Father, Like Son (2013), makes movies about things like loss, abandonment, and death, but his distinct touch —…
Sometimes a movie seems like it was more fun to make than it is to watch. Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates is one of those movies. Zac Efron and Adam DeVine are Dave and Mike Stangle, two troublemaking brothers with a knack for walking the tightrope of party-makers/breakers. With…
James DeMonaco’s Purge series, about a near future in which all crime is legal for one annual 12-hour period, began as a disturbing setup for basic genre thrills: 2013’s franchise-starter was essentially a home-invasion thriller with a dystopian twist. By the time Purge: Anarchy rolled around a year later, the…
In one of many throwaway gags in The Secret Life of Pets, a group of dogs gathering for an all-important rescue operation is momentarily sidetracked by a butterfly, which sends them into a riot of leaping and yelping. Pets are easily distracted, you see. And you know who else is…
If your city’s power grid shuts down this summer, it may be a brownout, or it may be an act of cyber-warfare — a straight-out-of-Hollywood scenario that suddenly seems scarily possible thanks to the labyrinthine story director Alex Gibney tells in his riveting documentary Zero Days. It’s complicated, but know…
Don’t let the publicity photos of the ensemble cast clad in ’70s-era tuxes and flower-child dresses, or even the cloying Mumford-mimicking soundtrack on the trailer, fool you: Captain Fantastic ain’t some twee, cutesy Wes Anderson romp or a Little Miss Sunshine knockoff. This dramedy marking the feature debut of longtime…
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…
