How much do you love AMC’s The Walking Dead? Do you find yourself imagining what it would be like to be on the show, trying to survive the zombie apocalypse alongside the remaining survivors? Do you care so much about certain characters that you become physically ill when they are killed? Are you so obsessed that you would consider taking a vacation to a private Bahamian island with some of the cast and crew?
James Baldwin passed away in 1987. Well, that’s partially true. He indeed succumbed to stomach cancer at age 63, but most of his life essence remained, via his books and essays deconstructing American culture. Filmmaker Raoul Peck (Lumumba, Sometimes in April) has been a Baldwin devotee since reading The Fire…
In Staying Vertical, as in nearly all of French filmmaker Alain Guiraudie’s tonically unorthodox work, the emphasis is on the abundant possibility of pairings and practices when people get horizontal. Filled with quite literal chubby-chasing, Guiraudie’s sexually anarchic romp The King of Escape (2009), for example, centers on a middle-aged…
Like Ava DuVernay’s 13th, Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro travels a straight, well-researched path from the darkest tragedies of American history to the ones that plague the country today. Both films filter African-American life through the prism of the societal construct called race, but while DuVernay’s dissertation focuses…
Delving into microeconomics and macroaggressions, Toni Erdmann, the dynamite, superbly acted third feature by writer/director Maren Ade, is social studies at its finest. This quicksilver, emotionally astute comedy operates on many different registers and moods: Whoopee cushions and gag teeth are part of the fun, but so too is a…
The title offers the first clue about what’s off. Calling this movie The Comedian suggests that Robert De Niro will be playing something definitive or archetypal, as if there’s just one kind of stand-up comic, as if he’s representing a genus rather than embodying someone singular. A glut of other…
In October of last year, in southwestern Kansas, three members of a militia called “The Crusaders” were arrested and charged with planning to blow up an apartment complex in tiny Garden City housing 120 Somali immigrants. According to Tom Beall, the Acting U.S. State’s Attorney, one defendant had said that…
Take it from the network that rebranded as Syfy: The best trick in The Magicians is its phoniness. The actors share a broad house-style stiltedness and uniform, plasticine good looks — even the same haircut. The sets, costumes and special effects, while often inventive (a baddie with a head made…
Miami is still on a film high from the spotlight that’s been placed on Moonlight and the city’s many festivals, from the Miami Jewish Film Festival to Borscht, taking place this time of year. But no film event is quite as big as the Magic City’s staple, the Miami Film Festival. The 34th edition will kick off big, with the March 3 opening night featuring actor, producer, and humanitarian Richard Gere in attendance.
Mary Tyler Moore, who died Wednesday at 80, was a reluctant feminist. She wouldn’t even call herself one at all. In 1970, when Moore embodied the character of flighty, 30-year-old single TV news producer Mary Richards on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, there was no other such woman portrayed on…
A Dog’s Purpose, based on the novel by W. Bruce Cameron, combines the philosophical belief that living beings are reborn into a different physical body after biological death with the voiceover narrative technique of Look Who’s Talking. The main character, Dog, dies in multiple wrenching scenes and is subsequently reborn;…
We all know what Miami looks like in the movies. It’s the same scene every time: a plane flies over a nonexistent “Miami” sign and whisks us into a flashy world of clubs, beaches, and salsa music. It’s the city of Miami Vice, or this year’s War Dogs, the based-on-real-events story of two South Beach schmucks who become unlikely arms dealers. It’s the Miami that gets sold to tourists, the one we construct at work in hotels and bars.
Gold’s value lies chiefly in the hearts and minds of those who seek it. The noble metal has driven humans to perpetrate ignoble acts on their quests to unearth it since at least 5000 B.C.E., when slaves divined for golden veins to lavish their Pharaohs with jewelry. The Incas even…
The Oscar buzz for Moonlight began shortly after the film started making the rounds at festivals such as Telluride and Toronto. By the time of its wide release in November, the buzz had grown into near-universal critical acclaim. At the Golden Globes earlier this month, the film won a statue for Best Picture, Drama, making recognition from the Academy Awards pretty much inevitable.
Quick, name an Archie Andrews personality trait. Yes, he’s red-headed and red-blooded, a horndog naïf with hashtag sideburns who is forever battled over by beauties he can’t be bothered to get anywhere with. But beyond that — who is he? Sometimes he’s in a sugar-sweet pop combo. Sometimes he tools…
“Art is a lie that tells a truth,” Pablo Picasso once said. The aphorism animates Pablo Larraín’s canny and vigorous Neruda, a sidelong biopic of the preeminent Chilean poet and politician, featuring a brilliant Luis Gnecco in the title role, that’s equal parts fact and fiction. (Conversely, Larraín’s film also…
I’m still trying to decide if Sundance’s decision to kick off its 2017 festival with An Inconvenient Sequel, Al Gore’s follow-up to his influential (and terrifying) climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth, is an act of political confrontation or a sign of helplessness. (Or both?) What kind of message does…
Back in 1987, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s film The Running Man depicted a 2017 game show in which convicted criminals fight for their lives, many times to the death, in an attempt to obtain freedom. The “runners” were constantly attempting to evade the “stalkers” in an attempt to keep themselves, and the…
Say this for Sleepless: It gives Michelle Monaghan more to do than almost anything else you’ve seen her in lately, whether it beTrue Detective or Patriots Day, and confirms once again that she should be in the lead far more often than Hollywood would have you believe. The positives don’t…
Last June, after the death of Muhammad Ali, Michael Mann’s Will Smith–starring 2001 film Ali was briefly re-released in theaters. This allowed many of us to see it with fresh eyes. What felt like an ambitious but underwhelming biopic 15 years ago now seems more and more like a masterpiece…
M. Night Shyamalan appears again to be having a moment. His last film, 2015’s grandparents-gone-wrong horror flick The Visit, proved a small hit with critics and audiences alike, and his latest, this week’s multiple-personality abduction thriller Split, seems poised to do likewise. And why not? Both films are effective chillers…
Despite his reputation, M. Night Shyamalan has never lived and died by the twist. His best films, such as Unbreakable or even last year’s cheerily nasty wicked-grandparents thriller The Visit, work first as accomplished, emotionally engaging suspense. What’s most memorable about them isn’t the final-act revelations or even the quietly…
