In movies, as in life, it was quite a year of highs and lows. These are our favorite films of 2017. Get Out As social commentary, as a horror movie that connected with an incredible amount of people, as a directorial debut for Jordan Peele—any way you look at it, Get Out was a huge […]
In movies, as in life, it was quite a year of highs and lows. These are our favorite films of 2017. Get Out As social commentary, as a horror movie that connected with an incredible amount of people, as a directorial debut for Jordan Peele—any way you look at it, Get Out was a huge […]
You can always tell the parts of a film that directors feel personally attached to by what hits the viewer on an emotional level—and what doesn’t make sense on any level. With The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro transports us to a world where love between two outcasts—a woman and a misunderstood amphibious man-fish […]
Not only is Star Wars: The Last Jedi the best entry in the series since 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back, it may well be the first to truly break new cinematic ground since the 1977 original. Writer-director Rian Johnson (Brick, Looper, the best episodes of “Breaking Bad”) employs the full arsenal of what a science […]
Not many people are able to fail their way to success, to turn what ought to have been their most humiliating defeat into fame and profit. Then again, Tommy Wiseau is not most people. A perplexing mix of sincerity and complete mystery, Wiseau gained notoriety as the writer, director, producer and star of what is […]
Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri isn’t the only story about the blurred lines between doing the right thing and making a bad situation worse, but it’s the only one that matters. McDonagh has made a career of pitch-black satires that find the humor and humanity in characters who are experiencing genuine torment—the regret […]
While attempting a brief vacation from being the world’s greatest detective, Inspector Hercule Poirot has been reading the hell out of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. With every page, he cackles in delight, a reaction likely based as much on the opportunity to let someone else tell the stories as on the book […]
In 2013, one of the deadliest wildfires in recent history claimed 25 lives, 19 of whom were members of an elite squad of firefighters known as the Granite Mountain Hotshots. All but one lost their lives while struggling to contain the blaze, which appeared routine until wind and other factors allowed it to spread beyond […]
A civil rights superhero movie? Why not? For a country so enamored with our national mythology, we are remarkably inconsistent when it comes to cinematic depictions of our historical figures. After all, many of our founding fathers owned slaves, and many more recent icons emerged at a time when personal shortcomings could not be as easily […]
The story of Queen Victoria and Abdul Karim—“the Munshi”—is one worth telling. Karim, a humble clerk in Agra, was invited to participate in a ceremony for the queen, which resulted in the initiation of a peculiar friendship that defied convention and stirred controversy among the Royal Court. All of the ingredients are there: class antagonism, […]
Could there possibly be anything more boring than a supposed spy thriller where the main character wins all the time and is immediately right with every hunch? That’s the experience of watching American Assassin’s Mitch Rapp (Dylan O’Brien), a character who is devoid of real personality so he can more fully embody the many contradictory […]