James Schamus has been making movies for as long as Ang Lee has been directing them. The two have penned and produced multiple films together, including Eat Drink Man Woman, The Ice Storm, Lust, Caution, and even Hulk. So moving into the role of director for the first time with…
Director Paula Ortiz’s brilliant spin on Federico García Lorca’s classic play Blood Wedding unfolds within the film’s first few seconds. La Novia (The Bride) opens with an overhead shot of a woman who appears almost mummified in a torn and bloodied dress. After a sudden gasp for air, actress Inma Cuesta peels…
Suicide Squad, the third installment of the DC Extended Universe series, hits theaters this weekend; and we’re super-pumped (crappy reviews be damned!). So pumped, in fact, that we decided play the part of the film’s secret government agency and create our own antihero team made up entirely of South Florida people…
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, published in 1943, might stand as a children’s classic, but it’s not-so-secretly a story for grown-ups. Kids have long been drawn to the book’s dreamy sense of wonder, to the golden-haired star-child of the title, but Saint-Exupéry’s ruminations on regret, solitude and loss belong…
“The world changed when Superman flew across the sky,” Viola Davis’ Amanda Waller says early on in Suicide Squad. “And then it changed again when he didn’t,” she continues, over somber images of the Man of Steel’s funeral following his (non-)death at the end of Batman v. Superman. Luckily, that…
Think back on all of the best or most-talked-about shows of the past few decades: The Sopranos. Seinfeld. Mad Men. Nearly all take place in New York City. But how often do you hear about a show set in Miami? Is it not a city worth writing about? Sure, it…
Writer Keith Gessen once said that Philip Roth wasn’t a misogynist and didn’t hate women because he spent all his time “thinking about fucking them.” But he did concede that Roth probably thought “women were a foreign country.” In James Schamus’ debut feature Indignation, an adaptation of a late Roth…
You can have your houses of cards, your Jessica Joneses, your wet hot American summers. The Netflix original with its finger firmest on the pulse of our fraught current moment? It comes from Germany, comprises three feature-length “episodes,” and commences its tale more than a quarter-century ago. NSU: Germany History…
Just over a minute into the third season of the Netflix animated comedy BoJack Horseman, an entertainment-news interviewer asks our hero, “What would an Oscar nomination mean for BoJack Horseman?” The rest of the season is dedicated to answering that question, tracking BoJack (voiced by Will Arnett) from press junkets…
Alec Baldwin is no Steve Harvey. Unlike Harvey, Baldwin seems diminished on the set of a retro ’70s game show dedicated to getting contestants to say gently dirty nonsense. On ABC’s baggy, boozy Match Game, Baldwin crabs into a skinny last-century microphone about how everything’s stupid: his celebrity panelists, the…
“A supermarket transforms into a universe about pregnancy when a preoccupied woman dashes in and discovers she’s pregnant with no way out.” To anyone who unfortunate enough to land in this situation, it probably sounds like a nightmare. But in her short film Supermarket, filmmaker Rhonda Mitrani intends to turn unplanned…
The ludicrous but amusing teen social-media thriller Nerve is committed to pinning its characters into a world we understand as ours. It opens with Skype, Spotify, Gmail and Chrome, all on the MacBook screen of a mousily beautiful teen, Vee (Emma Roberts), who you just know is one horrific adventure…
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…
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…
A more appropriate title for Jason Bourne might be Walking: The Motion Picture. This fifth entry in the franchise loosely (very loosely) based on Robert Ludlum’s best-selling novels brings back director Paul Greengrass and star Matt Damon to continue the tale of the good soldier-turned-amnesiac-assassin-turned-rogue agent doing battle against his…
Steve Allen didn’t know what to make of Frank Zappa. The clean-cut young musician was promising to “play the bicycle” on the set of The Steve Allen Show in 1963, spinning the wheels and tapping on the spokes. The result, with the help of a tuneless orchestra behind him and…
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…
Twenty-five years ago, Annie Leibovitz stunned America with her infamous portrait of Demi Moore — nude, bronzed, seven months pregnant — on the cover of Vanity Fair. The image of Moore’s proud, bare body, heavy with child and unmistakably erotic, meant that in some states the magazine had to be…
Like the real 1980s, Stranger Things gets more unsettling as it goes. The opening episode of the Netflix show, created by the Duffer Brothers, gives us swear-y, scruffy kids playing D&D and then, beneath a lavish suburban starscape, encountering the unknown — which one of the boys promptly hides in…
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…
Star Trek Beyond might be the Star Trekkiest film of the new, J.J. Abrams-ified Trek era. That is to say, it’s the one that feels the most like a turbo-loaded episode of the original series, and has at least some of that classic spirit of exploration and derring-do. That’s not…
To understand what Absolutely Fabulous (first a TV show and now a movie) means to Brits, you’d have to go back to the TV premiere in 1992. Margaret Thatcher had their economy in a stranglehold until her departure as Prime Minister two years earlier, and when every sensible citizen was…
