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It’s a shame Hulu shared only half the first season of the streamer’s new comedy-mystery series “Phony” with critics in advance, because so much depends on how the show resolves its central source of suspense. The premise is what one character calls a “reverse cuckoo situation,” or at least a potential one: When Sonny (Sam […]
Families are interesting. They all come with their own unique histories, prejudices and mysteries. Jon Robin Baitz’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated play “Other Desert Cities,” set in the years following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, explores harmful ideologies, grief, depression, memory and how secrets can wrap themselves around a family, slowly choking it from the inside out. […]
"Capturing Bigfoot" is an amazing documentary about the legend of Bigfoot — about how it was born, how it took hold, and how that iconic piece of film footage came to be. It’s a documentary that answers all the questions and solves all the mysteries. Unlike your typical film about UFOs, it doesn’t leave you with that vague feeling of "The truth is still out there, and I’m not sure what it is." "Capturing Bigfoot" shows you the truth, but what it really shows you is what that truth says about us, a society that went down the rabbit hole of wanting to believe and now, increasingly, lives there.
Adapting a solemnly complex, questioning novel as a cockeyed child’s-eye comedy worked once before for Taika Waititi — which is to say that “Jojo Rabbit,” his crass, mawkish “anti-hate satire” about a Hitler Youth member’s personal and political awakening, won him an Oscar and grossed nearly $100 million, in spite of its manifold artistic and […]
Andy Warhol famously said that in the future, everyone will have 15 minutes of fame. “Trust Me, I’m A Doctor” expands that tally to an hour and 51 minutes for Sandeep Kapoor, the physician who treated Playboy Playmate Anna Nicole Smith and was implicated in her death from a prescription drug overdose in 2007. That’s […]
Somehow, the word mania still seems wrong to apply to anything about Ella Langley, whose entire appeal is predicated on a kind of laid-back country modesty. But by any commercial standard, if the term fits, wear it. As you know — unless you’re one of those people who likes to brag on socials about being […]
Without overstating the case, when the Avalanches’ debut album “Since I Lost You” arrived out of a clear blue sky (to anyone outside of their native Australia, anyway) in 2000, its impact was like the arrival of the Beastie Boys’ “Paul’s Boutique” eleven years earlier: a mind-melting leap forward in the art of sampling, a […]
At times, he had a streak of Andy Kaufman’s antisocial hostility in him, as if comedy was his way of testing both himself and the audience, seeing what they would accept, and seeing if he would be accepted.
Thirteen years after Nickelodeon’s “Victorious” did its final curtain call, Netflix is returning to the Los Angeles-based performing arts school with a brand-new spinoff, “Hollywood Arts.” Created by Jake Farrow and Samantha Martin, the series follows Trina Vega (Daniella Monet reprising her role) as a struggling actress stuck in the shadow of her superstar sister, […]
A high-speed traffic accident leaves a college student in a wheelchair for life, but that’s merely the starting point of the narrative in “To Be Ordinary,” a sensitive, slowly enveloping film with scant interest in disability-drama cliché — instead offering an expansive portrait of how the young man’s entire family is affected by his accident […]
Fatalism, self-determination and imagination all gently wrestle for control of the narrative(s) in “Beach Fictions,” an enchanting and subtly profound diptych that follows one young woman through two diverging versions of the same day — saying much in the process about the voices, inner and otherwise, that we grant most control in our lives, for […]
Is it gross? At moments. Claustrophobic? A bit. Scary? Not even a little. The place Jay finds himself looks like a colonoscopy designed by H.R. Giger. The visual effects are…okay. At times, it’s as if we were locked in some pop-up theme-park ride called Full Cavity Search.
On the one hand, it wouldn’t be very apt for a show about a scrappy citizen journalist in a small heartland city to become a massive hit. On the other, FX’s “The Lowdown” was one of the great TV debuts last year, a follow-up from “Reservation Dogs” showrunner Sterlin Harjo that upped the star power […]
As one of the select few French actresses who has earned definite-article status in her homeland — referred to routinely as La Huppert, alongside the likes of La Binoche and La Deneuve — it’s immediately, amusingly jarring to see Isabelle Huppert cast as a thoroughly indefinite article: a jobbing movie extra whose name nobody recalls, […]
When a filmmaker tells a story based on real events, especially ones that are inspiring or heroic, there’s always a risk of hagiography. “Clean Hands” is a movie where the storytellers either take a lot of license with an actual person’s life to add drama, or don’t seem aware just how unflattering their subject’s behavior […]
Not since Zhang Yimou’s 2002 wuxia spectacle “Hero” has China landed an Oscar nomination for Best International Feature — and this dry spell surely won’t be broken with this year’s bombastic submission “Once Upon a Time in the Middle East.” Like most of the country’s entries over the past decade, this blockbuster epic — a […]
Partway through “VisionQuest,” the titular android Vision (Paul Bettany) attempts to help a British teenager named Tommy (Ruaridh Mollica) understand the precise nature of their relationship. The truth goes something like this: Vision is a reconstituted version of his former self, who was killed by Thanos in “Avengers: Infinity War” and then kinda-sorta brought back […]
There are films and series with asexual characters in them, but far fewer interested in the experiential questions about moving through society as asexual and aromantic, and considering that identity on a spectrum. Miki Tanaka’s debut feature “Silver Express” is one such film: a gentle character study observing the everyday annoyances of an asexual person […]
In an age where some call themselves activists merely through social media posting, stories of the dangers, consequences and occasional, very hard-won rewards of boots-on-the-ground political activism have additional potency. Though Yosep Anggi Noen’s compellingly angry and anguished “The Sea Speaks His Name” is set predominantly in the 1990s, chronicling grassroots student resistance to Indonesian […]
“Enjoy handmade art before it’s gone forever.” Keen-eyed viewers may read these words fleetingly on screen in the early stages of “Wildwood,” amid a wealth of fast-passing sights and sight gags as its young heroine cycles furiously through the homey, bustling streets of Portland, Oregon. Printed on a sign next to the craggly wares of […]
