Film, TV & Streaming

With Extract, Mike Judge Goes Back to Work

Serial killer Michael Myers, it turns out, has mother issues. In this disappointing sequel to his intense and much underrated 2007 remake of John Carpenter’s 1978 classic, Halloween, rock star turned filmmaker Rob Zombie sends Michael (Tyler Mane) on another killing spree at the urging of his now-dead mom (Sheri…

“If you remember Woodstock, you probably weren’t there,” the expression goes. And if you were, could you please stop gassing on about it? Aquarian Nostalgia™ is the most oppressively sanctimonious and dull stripe of reminiscing. Sure, the three free days of peace and music at Max Yasgur’s farm passed without…

Austin’s rebel without a crew, Robert Rodriguez works in exactly two filmmaking modes: fast, cheap genre violence (the El Mariachi trilogy, Sin City, Planet Terror), and fast, cheap, CGI-overloaded family adventure (the Spy Kids trilogy, The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl 3-D). One of the latter, Shorts is a cute…

Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds

A dapper (mostly) contemporary costume drama, The Time Traveler’s Wife is abundantly interior-decorated in vintage rococo. Eric Bana, to his credit, continues to wear the outfits picked out for him remarkably well. The hip-bougie upholstery even covers the band at the fairy-tale wedding, playing “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” It’s…

Seventeen years ago, when Reservoir Dogs was setting American cinema on fire, Quentin Tarantino drove up to his favorite watering hole, a Hollywood Denny’s, in a tiny Geo that I mistook for a rental car. During a scheduled hour-long interview that stretched into nearly three, I nagged him about the…

The aliens have already been with us for 20 years at the beginning of South African director Neill Blomkamp’s fast and furiously inventive District 9, their huddled masses long ago extracted from their broken-down mother ship and deposited in the titular housing slum on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Unlike the…

In the same week that the South African import District 9 gives us a Johannesburg beset by alien invaders, the latest film by animation legend Hayao Miyazaki envisions a small Japanese port town turned upside down by visitors from the bottom of the sea. Loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s…

Credited as the first “action figure,” G.I. Joe came to life in 1964 as Hasbro’s answer to Mattel’s Barbie doll. There were actually four Joes — one for each branch of the armed forces — and in the imaginations of boys everywhere, they fought Nazis. Forty-odd years later, the Joes…

Top Chef: In praise of the Julia half of Julie & Julia

Love Hurts: (500) Days of Summer

Miamian Ric O’Barry’s The Cove Hits Theaters

Funny People: It’s a Wacky Life

The premise, punched-up puns, and character development are more lightweight than the helium balloons in Up, but Disney’s new CGI-heavy excuse to flood the market with kiddie merch (it’s the year’s first 3-D commercial, and we’re the real guinea pigs) has a box office trick up its shallow sleeve: Jerry…

Lynn Shelton’s Humpday, a sexual sitcom, opens with a pair of breeders in bed. A youngish married couple, Ben (mumblecordeon Mark Duplass) and Anna (Alycia Delmore), confess they’re too tired to procreate that night and then confess their mutual relief. As if in response, the doorbell rings at 2 a.m…

If you think it’s impossible to underestimate the cultural significance of American Idol, go see British filmmaker Havana Marking’s documentary about its Afghani imitator, a smash hit TV show whose musical wannabes run the gamut of Afghanistan’s bruising ethnic divisions. The even more socially and geographically heterogeneous audience votes for…

Joshua Leonard came undone at Cannes. It wasn’t just that Humpday, the film in which he stars, had made it into the festival’s prestigious Directors’ Fortnight — unlikely enough for a movie about two straight friends who decide to shoot a gay porn together for art’s sake, and which cost…

Don’t let the PG rating fool you: The dark arts are back with a vengeance in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the generally grim, occasionally startling, and altogether enthralling sixth chapter in a movie franchise that keeps surprising just when one would expect it to be puttering along on…

Moon, directed by British advert tyro Duncan Jones, is a modest science fiction film with major aspirations. Jones’s debut is pleased to engage genre behemoths — 2001, Solaris, Blade Runner — as well as B movie classics like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The tale of a lonely spaceman might…

“Heterosexuals can’t understand camp because everything they do is camp,” opined an associate of the old Playhouse of the Ridiculous, a New York theater known for its good-natured, anarchic sexual farce — a piece such as Turds in Hell, which offered a farrago of sodomy, sadomasochism, incest, coprophagia, bestiality, homosexual…

Eleven-year-old Anna Fitzgerald’s parents didn’t just plan for her — they customized her in utero, with the specific end of providing spare parts and infusions for her leukemia-sick older sister, Kate. From a 2004 Jodi Picoult bestseller, My Sister’s Keeper mashes Death Be Not Proud with Irreconcilable Differences. When Kate…