Did you know that there’s a new family-audience feature film that implies God nuked Japan because one plucky American moppet dared to dream? That’s no exaggeration. In the summer of 1945, the kid stands on a California dock, points his fingers magician-style out at the Pacific horizon, and screams a…
There’s not quite as much desert and dancing as you might expect in Desert Dancer, an earnest and occasionally hokey drama about kids wanting to hoof it in a world that forbids all hoofin’. Since it’s a based-on-a-true-story job, and since the killjoys this time are the Iranian government, much…
The trolling is coming from inside the house! Mere emojis can’t capture the plugged-in joys of the first hour or so of haunted-Internet teen flick Unfriended, which knives with dexterous wit The Way We Live Now. Here’s a clutch of horny high school dopes hanging out on Skype, getting doxed…
A curiosity: The actor Dick Miller, a rumpled salt, has brightened up countless B-movies by showing up for a scene or two to reel off some exposition or maybe get gutted by a robot. Yet his own movie, the one about his years of B-brightening, the one inviting us to…
The screen version of any long-running comic-book superhero inevitably feels thin compared to the richly detailed idea of that hero in the minds of the fans who grew up with it. Five movies in, no Hollywood Spider-Man has yet embodied, all at once, the comic iteration’s glorious contradictions. He’s the…
The Amazing Randi insists that the public wants to be fooled, that it’s easier and more comforting for us not to see unromantic truths — you can see him proclaiming this, a little sadly, in Justin Weinstein and Tyler Measom’s doc An Honest Liar, which plays like a companion piece…
Here at last is peak Kendrick: In intimate long takes and in comic montage, she belts, hurts, swoons, and rages, always remaining appealingly human. You can tell, when Anna Kendrick scraps for her big notes, that she’s not a natural, that she’s working hard, that she’s living a dream. All…
American Sniper notwithstanding, the first fresh multiplex trend to emerge in 2015 is Old White Dudes Learning How to Share Their World. First came Kevin Costner in the sour Black or White, playing a coot who discovers that black folks love their kids, too, even in South Los Angeles. Who…
Those more devoted to the genre can debate whether Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsman is the best comic-book movie of the last few years. What’s beyond argument, however, is that Vaughn has whipped up the most interesting one, the only to make ferocious, unsettling art out of the great contradiction of superheroic…
“You ready for another miserable video game?” I heard one critic crack to another as I settled in for Jupiter Ascending. “Maybe in March we’ll see this year’s first good movie,” his pal said back, as if Girlhood, Hard to Be a God, Amira & Sam, Timbuktu, Joy of Man’s…
It’s hard to imagine that George Lucas has cared, much, about the fan-revolt he’s faced since ’97 or so, the year he thumbed CGI Colorforms all over the original Star Wars movies. But there’s one criticism that seems to have stung him: that Lucas, a good Marin County liberal, populated…
Look, if it’s going to have any chance of stirring in us that warm, giddy, life-saving thrill of love actually working out, a romantic comedy with a happy ending probably has to cheat a little bit, to inflate its obstacles, to make those final moments truly momentous. To honor that…
There are few hard-and-fast rules in screenwriting, but here’s one I think we can agree on: Something’s gone wrong if your crowd-pleasing family drama asks audiences to hope a child’s father proves to be a crackhead. That’s one baffling turn in Mike Binder’s Black or White, a movie about race…
The most pleasurably ludicrous highlight of The Boy Next Door comes half an hour in, before the sex and murders and something’s-in-the-mirror-behind-her! jolts that stud the film like Flavor Crystals. The high school English teacher played by Jennifer Lopez is dazzled by a gift from the handsome student (Ryan Guzman)…
Here’s the pipsqueak who has hauled himself up into a sharp-dressed leading man. Here’s the comic who’s boundlessly inventive in his swearing but also suave and commanding in pursuit of love, the motormouth horndog who yawps about like a puppy on fire but can melt your mother’s heart with his…
Smarter Than the Average Emerson argued that each flourish and tendril of a work of art has its exact corollary in the mind of the artist, that creative expression is always, in its way, a sort of autobiography: Want to know the person? Look at their works. But Ralph Waldo…
Twitter is double-stuffed with check-your-privilege messages for entitled men, but I’ve rarely seen one as potent as this singular line from Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s out-of-time masterwork Winter Sleep, a Chekhovian drama of marriage and class and the way both can inspire insulated cluelessness. “Just once, I’d like you to defend…
Before worrying ourselves over its qualities as an adaptation, or its findings as an experiment in just how much tumpety-tump parump-pa-bump the human mind can endure, let’s take a moment to marvel that Rob Marshall’s Into the Woods even exists — as a PG from Disney, no less! No matter…
The biggest laugh I heard from the audience at my screening of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies came after seven words in the end credits: “Based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien.” Just picture that tweedy Oxford philologist nodding in approval at this adaptation of his lark…
What kind of circle is time again? A year after blowing the doors off our annual critics’ poll, golden boy Matthew McConaughey won just a single vote for his turn in the loudest movie of the year, Christopher Nolan’s tears-in-space effort Interstellar, which has tied with the unprescient Transcendence as…
The biggest laugh I heard from the audience at my screening of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies came from seven words in the end credits: “Based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien.” Just picture that tweedy Oxford philologist nodding in pleased approval at this adaptation of his…
Available on demand November 28, and playing at the Texas Theater beginning December 5. If we’re honest, most of us who relish a good horror film don’t actually hope to feel something like horror. The appeal is, instead, that of shock and surprise, all candied up, the crowd-pleasing bits staged…
