Few people in recent memory have risen to the challenge of history as has Malala Yousafzai, the remarkable young Pakistani education activist who miraculously survived an attempt on her life by the Taliban for her outspoken views. Malala began anonymously feeding information and arguments about the status of female access to education in the Swat […]
Matt Damon may be the star of Ridley Scott’s The Martian, but science itself is the hero in this breezy yet breathless tale of survival against all odds, bucking Hollywood’s preference for redundant fiction over interesting science in its sci-fi. The characters are charming, the tension is palpable, nearly every joke lands, yet by putting […]
When word began to spread that director Roland Emmerich—the destruction junkie behind Independence Day, Godzilla (1998), The Day After Tomorrow and 2012—had made an offensively revisionist mockery of the Stonewall riots in a movie that is supposedly dedicated to their legacy, the punning headlines practically wrote themselves. Although it’s tempting to call Stonewall yet another […]
Director Ridley Scott disappointed more than just his own fans when Prometheus was released in 2012. As it happened, Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth) had been crafting an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s groundbreaking horror novella, At the Mountains of Madness, that apparently bore more than a passing similarity to Prometheus’ tale of humanity’s ancient […]
In some ways, the uniting of M. Night Shyamalan and microbudget horror production company Blumhouse for The Visit couldn’t be more perfect, and not just because audiences groan at the sight of their names during previews. Both camps are fully capable of greatness—Shyamalan’s first two and a half films and Blumhouse’s Insidious, Creep and even […]
If one were feeling particularly generous, parallels could be made between the recent spate of French-produced English language action films and the heyday of the spaghetti Western. Between the campy play at sophistication, the stylistic exploitation of genre tropes and the strange juxtaposition of gritty Anglophone leading men battling actors whose onscreen dialogue appears to […]
There are two types of people who will find something of value in the EDM apologia We Are Your Friends: GoPro oversharers who post hours of vapid, slow-motion footage to Vimeo, and sad bros who lament that “Entourage” never had a Coachella episode. Certainly, there is a worthy story somewhere within the world of electronic […]
As if there were any doubt, the age of the comic book movie is here to stay, having embedded its logic and narrative rhythms so deeply in our psyche that even a wholly original, self-contained story like American Ultra cannot help but play like an attempt to introduce yet another franchise. Essentially an origin story […]
Inspired, electric and full of the same rawly honed talent that drove its subjects to their creative heights, if Straight Outta Compton were the last musical biopic ever made, it would have been worth suffering through all of the perfunctory crap the genre has produced in the past. Where most biopics lean on the lead […]
In a film industry where every studio release is engineered to appeal either to all audiences or hyper-specific target demographics, the fact that a film like Ricki and the Flash found release is refreshing. Baby boomers/Gen Y, liberals/conservatives, wealthy/working class, no one subset of American filmgoers will find their entertainment whims catered to in this […]