While sitting uncomfortably in the front row of a screening room earlier this week, I spent the time between my squirms and groans dreaming of bolting from the theater to find an idling DeLorean waiting for me on the street, ready to travel back in time convince director Nicolas Winding Refn to abandon The Neon Demon.…
One thing you should know about The Shallows is that Blake Lively spends a lot of it—or maybe just a few minutes of it, I wasn’t timing—lying on a floating whale carcass after being attacked by an angry great white shark. Another thing you should know about The Shallows is that, apart from a few brief phone calls to…
Keanu is a movie about a couple of black dudes who try to save a kitten by pretending to be drug dealers. But is it supposed to be funny because the black guy really loves his kitten? Is it about the kitten loving him back? Is the joke about not being black enough? Not being tough enough?
Despite our fascination with the lives of people who have been deemed societally “important” because of accomplishments, fame and riches, the nitty-gritty of how and why we know what we know about them often gets swept under the rug. Vanessa Gould’s documentary Obit, which just premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival,…
Film criticism isn’t the same as it used to be in terms of influence (i.e. the era of Roger & Ebert), but reviews still have the power to sway the masses. After analyzing a chunk of data and box office numbers, Metacritic determined that reviews have a measurable impact on how well a movie does at the box office.
It’s sort of remarkable to think about Zootopia. In the context of itself the film is not remarkable, except that it is a very good movie, confirmed by its formerly 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes (now 99%), and the $73.7 million it made at the box office this weekend.
Zoolander 2, like many a garbage sequel, was destined to spiral into the abyss of bad movies whose reviews are much more entertaining than the movie itself, the type that allows critics to bathe in the pettiest of metaphors.
Critics agree. The Revenant is a visually and emotionally visceral film in which Leonardo DiCaprio puts himself through actual physical and mental torture. They say this movie is peak masculine grit and fortitude—the story of a true survivalist—and Leo will finally win an Oscar for Best Actor. I find that laughable.
Star Wars zips and zaps into theaters this weekend, and I was lucky enough to see it last night with a hugely excited crowd who screamed, laughed, and applauded at all the right moments. It was a wonderful theatrical experience for a truly wonderful movie—one worthy of its years-long hype and the Star Wars name…
Todd Haynes has spent a significant chunk of his career making movies about long-suffering women. There’s the anorexic Karen Carpenter in Superstar, the suffocating Orange County housewife Carol Hicks in Safe, the betrayed and hopelessly lovesick Cathy Whitaker in Far From Heaven, and the famously shat-upon mother in …
I saw Mockingjay-Part 2 aka The Hunger Games Part 4 aka the one where Katniss almost died a few more times and not much else happened in “IMAX,” in what is apparently the biggest theater in New York City. “This is my favorite place in the city,” my effortlessly cool viewing companion told me as we settled in. “I come…
Mark Ruffalo does a lot of running in Spotlight. His character, Mike Rezendes, is the kind of whippersnapper of a journalist you used to see in movies about journalists back when people made more movies about journalists, and the story he’s working on often requires him to get from point A (usually the courthouse) to…
Miss You Already begins with some brief narration over a collage of photographs—each one of Jess (Drew Barrymore) and Milly (Toni Collette) smiling or laughing or getting into some kind of trouble. In a wonderful line that describes the essence of their friendship—as well as many friendships in general—Jess says,…
You could call Steve Jobs a filmed adaptation of a book. Or, more accurately, you could call it a filmed adaptation of a book that’s structured like a play. More simply, you could just call it a filmed play. And—if you wanted to get complicated—you could call it a film based on a book based on a man and written in the…
I have a feeling the real Mary Mapes is nothing like Cate Blanchett’s version of Mary Mapes in James Vanderbilt’s Truth. Not because I’ve met Mary Mapes or am particularly familiar with her (beyond video clips I watched in an attempt to familiarize myself with her mannerisms), but because the weight of Cate…
The concept of “the Final Girl” was conceived by Carol Clover in her 1992 book, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Clover describes the “last girl standing” in horror movies as sharing similar characteristics such as being virginal and having a gender-neutral name, examples of whom include…
Robert Zemeckis’s new film, The Walk, opens with Joseph Gordon Levitt staring at the camera in a distracting wig and asking, in a French accent, “Why?” It’s a good question, and one I asked myself often after learning of the project. (More specifically, I wailed it like I was Nancy Kerrigan being struck by a pipe…
I almost missed The Intern. Not because of a ticket mishap or projector problem, but because it came this close to not getting the green light. Nancy Meyers, the film’s writer and director, says it was the hardest movie she’s ever made, and that the process of selling it was both “frustrating and disheartening.”…
There are two things I need when I see a horror movie in the theater: First, a giant Diet Coke to guarantee that I’ll have to go to the bathroom and miss at least one scare. Second, an Ativan.
After viewing the trailer for Ricki and the Flash, you’ll learn two things: 1. Meryl Streep can sing, and 2. the entire plot of Ricki and the Flash. More than any movie in recent memory, its trailer goes through every major beat in the story—down to the rousing finale. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
