Poltergeist 2015 is to Poltergeist ’82 what today’s shipped-frozen-to-the-store Pizza Hut dough is to the kneaded-on-site pies the chain’s stoned cooks tossed in the Reagan era. It’s the same kind of thing, with the same shape and some shared ingredients, but the texture’s gone limp, and there’s no sense of…
Maybe we contain multitudes, and maybe we contain a couple of great splashes of primary colors. With one arm stretched high above his head, puppeteer Caroll Spinney has spent decades embodying the warmest of yellows and grimiest of greens, playing — in every sense of the word — Sesame Street’s…
This doesn’t feel like a film that exists. How is George Miller’s bonkers, exhausting, no-future smash-’em-up Mad Max: Fury Road not one of those almost-was boondoggles mourned and dreamed of by fans, a revered director’s impossible vision that, thanks to the unstout hearts of studio bean counters, never actually vaulted…
You might want to protest that a sparkling new print of Grey Gardens violates the point of Grey Gardens. But if you feel strongly about it — or if you’ve never had the chance to witness the Fall of the House of Beale on a big screen — there’s no…
One of the most inspired ideas in late-middle Woody Allen pictures comes in Deconstructing Harry, a movie about how Allen loves Bergman, hates Philip Roth, and isn’t quite clear on what “deconstruction” means. Allen stages passages from fiction written by the protagonist, a novelist named Harry; one features Robin Williams…
One of Kristen Wiig’s finest moments as a movie star is a throwaway bit of shamed, silent, morning-after comedy: Her Bridesmaids character is skulking out of the home of a cad played by Jon Hamm. She’s playing it cool, swallowing the humiliation of her bad choices, trying to show him and herself that she doesn’t need him for anything.
It’s tempting to suggest that if you have any interest in Iranian film in general, or in particular Asghar Farhadi — the director and writer of that shred-your-heart masterpiece A Separation — you should simply get yourself to Farhadi’s About Elly without knowing a thing about it besides its title.
Did you know there’s a new family-audience feature film that implies God nuked Japan because one plucky American moppet dared to dream? That’s no exaggeration.
The trolling is coming from inside the house! Mere emojis can’t capture the plugged-in joys of the first hour or so of haunted-internet teen flick Unfriended, which knives with dexterous wit The Way We Live Now.
For any thinking person, little in Josef Kubota Wladyka’s fleet and sweaty Colombian-smuggler thriller Manos Sucias will surprise. Drug-running is work for the broke and desperate; the runners might be less broke after a delivery, but that desperation only grows worse; killing is grim and painful and utterly unlike the…
Truth in film takes another jolly beating in Disneynature’s Monkey Kingdom, a documentary-like nature flick with the last-century chutzpah to pass off its marvelous footage of some months in the life of a single-mom macaque as a full-fledged princess story, with three acts, a tearful exile, and her ascent, in the final reels, to the throne. (Oops, spoiler for the anthropomorphized-monkey movie.)
The screen version of any long-running comic-book superhero inevitably feels thin compared to the richly detailed idea of that hero in the minds of the fans who grew up with it. Five movies in, no Hollywood Spider-Man has yet embodied, all at once, the comic iteration’s glorious contradictions.
The Amazing Randi insists that the public wants to be fooled, that it’s easier and more comforting for us not to see unromantic truths. You can see him proclaiming this, a little sadly, in Justin Weinstein and Tyler Measom’s doc An Honest Liar, which plays like a companion piece to…
“The public really doesn’t listen when they’re being told straightforward facts,” says the Amazing Randi. The magician, escape artist, and tiny lion of principled skepticism, now north of 80, leans forward in a black chair, all knees and elbows and Old Testament beard. If it weren’t for that sharpie’s suit…
Céline Sciamma’s pained, thrilling, observational tale of growing up broke and black in slab-like Paris flats is no rebuke to Boyhood, but its besties-dancing-to-Rihanna rhapsody eats the lunch of that bit where Richard Linklater has Ethan Hawke drone on about Wings. They sing, “We’re beautiful like diamonds in the sky!”…
Spike Lee still summons miracles — but sometimes you gotta dig for them. I can’t exactly recommend Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, his remake/cover/jazz-variation on Bill Gunn’s epochal indie lulu Ganja and Hess, but I can recommend Ganja and Hess, so elusive and bloody and challenging a picture that it’s…
American Sniper notwithstanding, the first fresh multiplex trend to emerge in 2015 is Old White Dudes Learning How to Share Their World. First came Kevin Costner in the sour Black or White, playing a coot who discovers that black folks love their kids too, even in South Los Angeles. Who…
Here at last is peak Kendrick: In intimate long takes and in comic montage, she belts, hurts, swoons, and rages, always remaining appealingly human. You can tell, when Anna Kendrick scraps for her big notes, that she’s not a natural, that she’s working hard, that she’s living a dream. All…
Crazy-Pants Spy Parody Kingsman Smartly Exposes Us as the Bad Guys
“You ready for another miserable video game?” I heard one critic crack to another as I settled in for Jupiter Ascending. “Maybe in March we’ll see this year’s first good movie,” his pal said back, as if Girlhood, Hard to Be a God, Amira & Sam, Timbuktu, Joy of Man’s…
It’s hard to imagine that George Lucas has cared much about the fan revolt he’s faced since ’97 or so, the year he thumbed CGI Colorforms all over the original Star Wars movies. But there’s one criticism that seems to have stung him: that Lucas, a good Marin County liberal,…
There are few hard-and-fast rules in screenwriting, but here’s one we can probably agree on: Something has gone wrong if your crowd-pleasing family drama asks audiences to hope a child’s father proves to be a crackhead. That’s one baffling turn in Mike Binder’s Black or White, a movie about race…
