Film, TV & Streaming

For a movie centered around the needless death of a child, Jalilvand (Wednesday, May 9) creates a heartbreaking but still hopeful story

Director Josephine Decker laughs when New Times describes her latest film, Madeline’s Madeline, as grounded. “It’s funny that you call this work grounded, because the truth is I thought this was the least accessible film I was making. I thought I was making something crazy, intense, and maybe poetic — something that was a lot like ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ and followed musical motifs more than narrative motifs,” she says.

Like many Gothic tales, The Little Stranger hangs tantalizingly between genres: It has elements of haunted house thriller, of doomed romance, of psychological thriller, of historical allegory

“Tonight I’m resolved to be led by fate!” a young woman proclaims in Masaaki Yuasa’s wild animated feature, Night Is Short, Walk On Girl. From beginning to end, the character known as the Girl With Black Hair (Kana Hanazawa) rolls on like a train with an endless track, chugging her way through as many bottles of alcohol as there are stars in the sky over Kyoto.

… Like that of I Love You, America, Cohen’s apparent goal of exploring America’s multitudes belies his show’s actual focus on belittling, baiting or simply giving a platform to white Americans in particular

What becomes clear, watching McEnroe harangue line judges and intrusive photographers, is that the rages were birthed in a disappointed agony, a disgust at a world with inhabitants who persistently failed to see what he did

Most of Nico, 1988 takes place two years before its subject’s death, in 1986, when a now raven-haired Nico (played with an inquisitive weariness by the excellent Dyrholm) tours Europe with a band of amateur musicians desperate for gigs

There’s no narration and very little onscreen text, just a steady drumbeat of clips and sound bites that portray how nuclear warfare went from a welcome announcement — the big new bombs that would end World War II — to an international arms race …

This is a story of stifling manners and oppressive codes of conduct, where the wealthy “villains” wear a strained smile and an icky sheen of privilege

Its unruly scenes emerge out of disorder, out of chants and shrieks and fractured images, and always threaten to fade back into abstraction

This is a portrait of a decades-long partnership coming to a head but also of the American literary community reckoning with what so many know to be true: Women are still not seen as “serious” writers or contenders for major prizes

Peretz could have given each potential pairing equal time in the story, but he sticks with the most evocative of the two; Juliet, Naked has its charms, and they are named Rose Byrne and Ethan Hawke

Weitz’s film, concerning a Mossad team’s 1960 hunt for Eichmann, is a sort of Argo Goes to Munich, blending heist movie jollies with some moral inquiry into justice, revenge, torture and execution

The film’s wrenching centerpiece is the 2014 death of Eric Garner, killed due to “compression of neck, compression of chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police” who suspected him of selling loose cigarettes

The first thing you should understand about The Little Stranger, the new film by Room director Lenny Abrahamson, is that it’s only partly a ghost story. The period film, which follows a country doctor tending to a high-society family in its crumbling mansion, speaks to a shift in the class…

At its best, the show was a canny deconstruction of contemporary late-night comedy, which has been swamped with political satire since Stewart, the former Daily Show host, turned Bush-era liberal outrage comedy into its very own TV genre

Happytime Murders, though, demands that we take its world somewhat seriously, that we invest ourselves in the tensions between people and puppets, that we buy into its by-the-book serial-killer narrative …

Secrets get exposed, cultural barriers get smashed and re-erected, and every apparent villain will prove heroic and every hero something of a villain

… I imagined how whatever scene I was watching might have been staged and shot and acted out in a more traditional film — and I was inevitably disappointed by what has been lost …

Filmed in black and white in the wintry countryside of Görlitz, Germany, Schwentke’s vision of a man who would be posthumously named the Executioner of Emsland is chilling and yet, at times, almost farcical

Though Moselle’s narrative feature debut, Skate Kitchen, tells a fictional story, the director again draws heavily from her subjects’ own personal histories, this time constructing a story about teen girls finding themselves and each other at the local skate park

This new version, directed by Danish filmmaker Michael Noer, brings to the story a refreshing intensity and sweep, and even a sense of adventure