The Big Short: too funny to fail
Smart, profane and funny, The Big Short is Hollywood's most welcome surprise of 2015: a hugely entertaining movie about the credit-default swaps that tanked our economy at the dawn of the Obama...
View ArticleJoy can't wring enough out of Jennifer Lawrence
The first 45 minutes or so of Joy, writer-director David O. Russell's feature-length attempt to pass the Bechdel Test (A plus, not for nothing), taps into the self-assured giddiness of his previous...
View ArticleTodd Haynes' quiet precision makes Carol one of the best films of the year
The other night, I decided to rewatch my two favorite movies this year — two movies that couldn't be more different, except for the love I feel for them. Mad Max: Fury Road is all maximalist gestures,...
View ArticleConcussion hits you with Serious Will Smith until you can't think straight
If you think a movie centered on establishing a link between pro football and a brain condition disproportionally suffered by NFL players — called chronic traumatic encephalopathy — sounds maybe a...
View ArticleThe Danish Girl isn't the hoped-for advance in transgender portrayal
Articulating exactly what is wrong, insulting and grotesque about The Danish Girl — The King's Speech director Tom Hooper's latest bit of corporate Oscar bait — is a job unto itself, and I'm by no...
View ArticleQuentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight declares war upon us all
Something awful must have happened to Quentin Tarantino in the past couple of years. The writer-director's new The Hateful Eight echoes Pier Paolo Pasolini's punishing Salò — it's a perfectly realized...
View ArticleRelentless and visually astonishing, The Revenant serves revenge cold — after...
Leonardo DiCaprio suffers mightily and nobly through Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s The Revenant. And make no mistake about it — it’s definitely the actor suffering up there.…
View ArticleYour week in film, TV and beyond. This week: The X-Files
Wednesday 1.20 Season two of the post-WWII spy series Marvel's Agent Carter premiered on ABC last night.…
View ArticleAnomalisa is Charlie Kaufman's loneliest (and smallest) movie yet
Charlie Kaufman's Anomalisa doesn't have the sprawling scope of his last feature, 2008's Synecdoche, New York. It doesn't have the same faint glint of hopeful sentimentality as 2004's Eternal Sunshine...
View ArticlePanic Fest returns, boasting Synchronicity and The Invitation among its thrills
Time travel hasn't been invented yet — as far as we know — but the rules of the time-travel genre are constantly being re-invented. As Bruce Willis grumped to the younger version of himself (Joseph...
View ArticleThe Witch spooks for the supernatural and the religious
If there were zero supernatural forces in The Witch (subtitled A New-England folktale), then writer and director Robert Eggers might have stirred a discussion about the human toll of religious...
View ArticleTrue/False returns with another set of prize-worthy documentaries
In a high point of last Sunday's Academy Awards telecast, Louis C.K. admonished the film community and audiences for not paying more attention to short documentaries. Whoever won the category's Oscar...
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