In 2012, when Mark Wahlberg told a Men’s Journal reporter that he probably could have defused the hostile takeover of one of the 9/11 flights, he wasn’t just committing an insensitive, dunderheaded faux pas of run amok machismo. He was also providing the world a preview of the next few years of his Hollywood career.…
Say this, if nothing else, for the new Puppet Master: It delivers all the puppet-on-person mayhem a bloodthirsty midnight-movie audience could ever demand. In fact, for long stretches of its slender 90-minute running time, The Littlest Reich plays like nothing more or less than its own kills-only supercut, offering…
In the background of all the painful and very necessary conversations about gender, power, and talent that have come out of the #MeToo movement, a figure has hovered. He’s frequently a drunk or a philanderer (or both), usually surrounded by sycophants who hang on his every word, and always intimidating and…
For the past two months, at least half of the top 10 movies at the North American box office have been sequels or prequels. That’s not to say the boy-and-dog adventure story Alpha deserves extra credit just for not being part of a series, at least not officially. (If anything, the movie might deserve less credit for…
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…
