Something troubling is afoot in Westeros: The heroes are beginning to outnumber the villains. The sixth season of Game of Thrones has already seen Jon Snow’s return from the dead, Arya Stark’s vision restored and — courtesy of two Stark children’s long-awaited reunion — the show’s first-ever tears of joy…
Pedro Telleria studied medicine at the University of Havana in the 1920s. He was later a successful builder and contractor in Miami’s MiMo district in the 1950s. And somehow, in all that time, he became one of the most influential Cuban orchestra leaders. Yet, if you did a quick Google…
Never one to betray the courage of his convictions, Luca Guadagnino excels at the unrepentantly grandiose and ludicrous. The title alone of his previous narrative feature, I Am Love (2009), signaled operatic sweep and loony sincerity, qualities further exalted by the film’s visual ravishments and seductive voluptuousness. The Italian director’s…
Let’s break the bad news this way. Maria Bamford’s new Netflix series isn’t a disaster. It’s sometimes funny — it’s got comic genius Maria Bamford in almost every scene! — but only its finest moments bear the stamp of sensibility. Too often, this fitful, clamorous show feels Bamford-flavored rather than…
In his tight, trim, health insurance thriller A Monster With a Thousand Heads, Mexican-Uruguayan director Rodrigo Plá achieves a visual style that is ice cold but also deeply human — a clever way to depict an all-powerful system that feeds on our lives and thrives on our fallibility. Plá opens…
In Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising, the sequel to 2014’s old-people-vs.-frat-brothers comedy, Zac Efron takes off his shirt in nearly every scene he’s in. It’s a sight to behold — again and again and again, but a calculated effort, like most of this film, to appeal to the ladies. As surprising…
If it had come out 20 years ago, when its creator was Hollywood’s best-paid screenwriter, Shane Black’s The Nice Guys might have stood, for some, as more proof that the studios had lost their way. So much money lavished on bloody buddy formula, on two-fisted archetypes cracking a case, some…
Stately, earthy, graphic, riveting: Gabriel Mascaro’s Neon Bull is one of those art-house studies that plops the camera down someplace far from us and, in exquisite long takes, examines the lives that almost seem to just be happening there anyway. No matter how rigorously worked out each shot and its…
Richard Bridgland was given an impossible task: recreate 1970s Hollywood for Shane Black’s buddy conspiracy thriller The Nice Guys … in Atlanta. As a production designer, Bridgland’s had to make the Czech Republic look like 1930s rural North Carolina (Serena), New Orleans look like West Virginia (American Ultra) and a…
From midday strolls on Calle Ocho with a cafecito in hand, to adventures among art-filled walls in Wynwood, the best way to see a city is through the eyes of a local. That’s why for its latest short, The Economist, Economist Films journeyed around Miami with an iconic drag queen, a Cuban…
As generic and impersonal as a new credit-card offer, Jodie Foster’s Money Monster is the latest big-studio production to try to cash in on populist outrage over Wall Street abuses and New Gilded Age inequality. There’s a lot of excitable talk about algorithms (or “algos”), the overuse of the term…
Ben Wheatley and Amy Jump’s microbudget black-and-white English Civil War mushroom-trip movie A Field in England (2013) squeezed a tense and bizarre story from just a few dudes wandering around in a field. The married couple and filmmaking team — Wheatley as director and Jump as writer — previously made…
On the surface, there has been a lot of forward movement on television for black women. We’re now able to see an incredible breadth of black female characters, including Cookie Lyon (Taraji P. Henson) on Empire, Rosalee (Jurnee Smollett-Bell) on Underground and Dr. Rainbow Johnson (Tracee Ellis Ross) on Black-ish…
None of us should give a crap about anything anyone says in Elstree 1976, but such is the nature of modern fandom that we do — even those of us whose affection for Star Wars is now more an occasional indulgence than a heated obsession. Jon Spira’s documentary is a…
In an appreciation published in The Guardian a few days after the death of J.G. Ballard, in April 2009, Martin Amis noted that the paragon of New Wave science fiction was “remorselessly visual.” Ben Wheatley’s muddled adaptation of the dystopian 1975 novel High-Rise — one of many Ballard books that…
All actors possess their own personal gateway into becoming a character. Some require deep memory mining (method). Others require lengthy conversations with the director about seemingly unrelated philosophical topics. And some just need a single physical characteristic around which they can develop a character’s entire being. Susan Sarandon is a…
Like The Imitation Game, The Man Who Knew Infinity is a Great Man biopic about a man most viewers have probably never heard of. Srinivasa Ramanujan was a brilliant, self-taught Indian mathematician who in his brief time on this earth made seismic contributions to his field. That he’s largely unknown…
If nothing else, Captain America: Civil War stands as something of a corrective to this spring’s other superheroes-bludgeoning-each-other opus, Batman v Superman. While that film was severe and downcast, Civil War is expansive, at times even light. BvS strove to redefine its superheroes to fit newer, darker, borderline-sociopathic molds; Civil…
It’s easy to think, based on the marketing, that the first feature film from acclaimed comedy duo Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele will be a hundred minutes of an adorable kitten dressed in a do-rag and gold chain for easy laughs, but Keanu is so so much more than that…
Is it too much to ask that all these holiday-themed rom-coms — Valentine’s Day, New Year’s Eve and now Mother’s Day — one day merge with the Halloween movies? Michael Myers might be the only one in either franchise with a truly cutting response to all the rhetorical musings about relationships romantic,…
Before Barack Obama opened diplomatic relations with Cuba, a filmmaker was breaking down barriers to shoot the first Hollywood movie there in 55 years. In 2014, after years of clearing red tape with the U.S. State Department and working with Canada, producer/director Bob Yari began shooting a film about Ernest…
If you thought the billionaire played by Steve Carell in Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher was eerie, please allow me to introduce you to the real John du Pont. A dangerous concoction of lonely and paranoid, du Pont was blessed with money and mobility and cursed with the kind of childhood that…
