A phenomenon of the 1940s, the superhero formerly known as Captain Marvel embodies a simpler era of comics, the sock‘’em Golden Age of godlike costumed do-gooders. But then, what superhero-addled kid of any generation hasn’t at some point wished for a secret identity, powers, and an opportunity to fight evil in any…

Born either in 1932 or 1934, depending on who’s asking, and dead by 1980, Barbara Loden was a brief glimmer in the eye of cinema history, a fleeting mirage that vanishes as soon as it appears on the edge of your peripheral vision. A North Carolina native who spent the last decade of her life trying to prove, to…

Larry Fessenden’s name is pretty much inextricable from independent horror cinema at this point. Over the course of the past few decades, he’s become not just an omnipresent indie character actor (turning up in everything from You’re Next to Session 9 to Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out The Dead), but through his…

Relaxer—one of the “grossest movies of the year”—follows unemployed slacker Abbie (Joshua Burge) who’s given a challenge: he is not allowed to leave the couch until he beats level 256 of Pac-Man. In honor of the film’s release today, we sat down with Joshua Burge, Andre Hyland, and director Joel Potrykus to talk about…

There’s a moment in 2017’s Wonder Woman that’s so inspiring, and so largely unprecedented, that it literally brought audiences to tears. It happened so many times that it became its own meme. It became a part of the experience. It’s the scene where Wonder Woman vaults out of a World War I trench and charges straight…

Relaxer—one of the “grossest movies of the year”—follows unemployed slacker Abbie (Joshua Burge) who’s given a challenge: he is not allowed to leave the couch until he beats level 256 of Pac-Man. Ahead of its release tomorrow, we sat down with Joshua Burge, Andre Hyland, and director Joel Potrykus to talk about the…

Food is one of the most powerful emotional forces on Earth. For many people, the smell and taste of a favorite childhood dish brings back vivid, nostalgic memories of a particular moment in time, often a moment when that person felt safe, content, and loved. For Masato (Takumi Saitoh), the half-Japanese,…

You know you’re in the hands of a natural born filmmaker when you can feel yourself being tugged, as if by invisible forces, from one shot to the next, into a movie’s diabolical design. That’s the sensation provoked by Jordan Peele’s Us, which begins with a sequence so expertly shot, cut, and orchestrated that you can…

Hotel Mumbai, a brutally realistic dramatization of the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, can’t help but inspire some thorny ethical questions. It arrives in theaters exactly one week after the nightmare in Christchurch, New Zealand—apparently, distributors are now resigned to every date on the calendar being in close…

Twisted fantasies of depraved junk-food consumption and revenge, the slacker-psycho comedies of Joel Potrykus (Buzzard, The Alchemist Cookbook) plumb the dark corners of self-destructive Midwestern loserdom—though never as theatrically or as bizarrely as in the unhygienic delirium of Relaxer, a film that evinces the…

In more ways than one, and true to its title, Dragged Across Concrete is abrasive. It comes from the mind of S. Craig Zahler, whose last grisly, leisurely, and evocatively named genre experiment, Brawl In Cell Block 99, climaxed with some rather literal abrasion: a face being loudly scraped against the hard floor of a…

Captain Marvel’s name is on the poster, but Goose the cat steals the limelight in Carol Danvers’ first feature. Cranky, steadfast, and always ready to fight, Goose is the perfect sidekick. Played by four different cats—Reggie, Rizzo, Gonzo, and Archie—Goose joins Hollywood’s pantheon of near-sentient animal life…

Three years ago, something rather extraordinary happened: A Holocaust drama won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. That in itself is nothing unusual, of course—when in doubt, while filling out your Oscar pool, always pick the movie involving Nazis (assuming there’s only one, that is), and you’ll rarely…

The ensemble cast of Gaspar Noé’s deranged new movie, Climax, is made up mostly of nonprofessional actors—of dancers playing dancers, pretending to have the world’s worst collective drug experience. The one exception is the film’s star ringer, Sofia Boutella, who got her start in dance but has transitioned into a…

Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s directorial debut The Mustang follows a convict in a rural Nevada prison who, as part of his state-mandated social rehabilitation, joins a wild horse training program. Ahead of its premiere, we spoke with Clermont-Tonnerre and star Matthias Schoenaerts about the film, and how it avoids the…

It’s really rather impressive, the extent to which Captive State sucks everything even potentially fun out of the alien-invasion genre. That includes, for the most part, the aliens themselves, who are spoken of much more often than they’re seen, words being free and all. Set in the aftermath of a worldwide…

Eddie Murphy is kind of a dreamboat. That can be hard to remember after the decades in which he settled into (or perhaps settled for) a career in broad comedic roles in lackluster family films. Indeed, it can be especially hard to remember if, like me, you were part of the generation that knew Murphy as the Nutty…

Just shy of an hour into his new movie, Ash Is Purest White, the great Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke offers up a truly ingenious, discombobulating callback. The setting, momentarily, is 2006. On the deck of a ferry approaching the banks of the Yangtze River, Jia’s longtime muse and spouse, Zhao Tao, surveys the…

Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s directorial debut The Mustang follows a convict in a rural Nevada prison who, as part of his state-mandated social rehabilitation, joins a wild horse training program. In the video above, star Jason Mitchell (The Chi, Straight Outta Compton) sits down to chat with us about the film, and…

Benjamin Franklin’s well-worn adage that time is money has led us, some centuries later, to the business of high-frequency trading, or HFT. Shares are bought and sold by algorithms in the blink of an eye for fractional profits that accumulate into millions—a mind-boggling business whose theoretical limits are the laws…