The “we” of Jeremiah Zagar’s We The Animals refers to three young brothers living in the backwoods of upstate New York, some time during the ’90s. Based on Justin Torres’ semi-autobiographical 2011 novel of the same name, the film retains its source material’s predominantly first-person-plural perspective—at least for…
Neither Romeo nor nudity makes an appearance in Juliet, Naked, a labored romantic comedy adapted from Nick Hornby’s 2009 novel. In fact, there isn’t even a title character—Juliet is the name of an album by fictional indie rocker Tucker Crowe (Ethan Hawke), who disappeared between sets of a gig back in the ’90s, never…
On August 9, the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences announced a series of changes to the annual Oscars ceremony, namely limiting the telecast to three hours and introducing a new category for “Outstanding Achievement In Popular Film.” The changes, particularly the “Best Popular Film” category, immediately…
In an outcome that’s both surprising (considering the plop with which it landed with critics) and not surprising at all (because it’s Jason Statham and a giant fucking shark), The Meg was the No. 1 movie in America last weekend. By quite a bit, too—the film outperformed expectations with a megalodon-sized $44.5…
Crazy Rich Asians isn’t a musical, but it feels like one. Frequent dance-movie director Jon M. Chu, who made a couple of the Step Up sequels, films the opulent world of Singaporean elite as if they might break out in song at any moment. A zippy montage of social media gossip feels like a modern…
Note: This article contains plot points of BlacKkKlansman.
Ken Marino’s newest movie Dog Days tells an interconnected story of the people of Los Angeles and their dogs, as they uncover life lessons and form new relationships—it’s basically Love, Actually with dogs. Ahead of the film’s premiere, we sat down with the cast—Marino, Eva Longoria, Adam Pally, Vanessa Hudgens, Nina…
Ken Marino’s newest movie Dog Days tells an interconnected story of the people of Los Angeles and their dogs, as they uncover life lessons and form new relationships—it’s basically Love, Actually with dogs. Obviously there are a ton of canines in the movie, which begs the question: How did they cast dogs in the movie?…
If Summer Of ’84 had come out before Stranger Things became a phenomenon, would it have been better received? Maybe. At least then it would have been novel. But the fact is that we are currently late in a cycle of films and TV series—a cycle that not only includes Netflix’s hit, but also last year’s Super Dark Times…
Let’s be reasonable: No one was expecting cinema gold from an August release in which Jason Statham fights a big prehistoric shark. But The Meg still failed to live up to our low expectations. Critics A.A. Dowd and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky sat down to discuss why on the latest (and final) Film Club.
Cats and turtles figure prominently into Madeline’s Madeline. The title character, an emotionally tempestuous New York teenager looking to channel her volatile feelings into acting, likes to role-play as a feline, purring and nuzzling on anyone in her radius, and sometimes to pantomime the slow crawl of a shelled…
Ken Marino’s newest movie Dog Days tells an interconnected story of the people of Los Angeles and their dogs, as they uncover life lessons and form new relationships—it’s basically Love, Actually with dogs. Ahead of the film’s premiere, we sat down with the cast—Marino, Eva Longoria, Adam Pally, Vanessa Hudgens, Nina…
It sounds like an easy enough cash grab, making a PG-13 Screen Gems horror picture about the Slender Man, the contemporary folktale told beside the modern-day campfire of the internet. But Slender Man actually has rough terrain to creep through; it could easily stumble into manic anti-technology paranoia (the message…
Based, as the opening credits pronounce, on “some fo real, fo real shit,” Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman is a riotous mess of contradictions: a true story that seems too outrageous to actually be true, a period piece that’s also a red-alert bulletin on current affairs, a very funny comedy about the very unfunny business…
If the kids are anything like Skate Kitchen, the real-life all-female New York City skate crew that inspired, shaped the direction of, and stars in The Wolfpack director Crystal Moselle’s narrative feature film debut of the same name, then they really are all right. Though concerned with stereotypical teenage-girl…
As children, we learn three things about the shark: that its skeleton is made of cartilage, like your nose; that when it loses a tooth, another will pop up in its place; and that if it stops moving, it will die. None of this information is comforting, given what we instinctively believe about the toothier members of…
On this week’s episode of Film Club, critics A.A. Dowd and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky sit down to discuss the latest from Spike Lee, which tells the bizarre true story of Ron Stallworth, a black detective for the Colorado Springs Police Department who infiltrates the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan by posing as a white…
Villains can be much more fun to play than heroes. Just ask Gary Oldman or Christoph Waltz or any actor who’s built a résumé filthy with scoundrels. But perhaps the dark side exerts a particularly seductive pull on those performers who don’t specialize in heavies, those who have established a reputation for playing…
Most films adapted from memoirs come across as stranger than fiction. It’s not Billy Moore’s fault that his experiences—recounted in the 2014 best-seller A Prayer Before Dawn: My Nightmare In Thailand’s Prisons—call to mind a host of previous movies, albeit combining what are usually two separate genres. What begins…
The sort of romantic sort of comedy Dog Days contains roughly one dozen dog reaction shots. This may sound like a lot, but consider that the movie runs for 112 minutes (averaging one dog reaction shot every nine minutes and 20 seconds), features heavy screen time for five dogs (averaging approximately two and a half…
