In 1993, before binge-watching was feasible and when most TV shows were made to be as accessible as possible, a drama series broke new ground, splitting its episodes between heavily serialized “mythology” installments and stand-alone “monster of the week” entries. That show was Chris...
Way back in the prolific filmography Steven Soderbergh (whose latest film, Unsane, is out on DVD this week), there’s the tiny Schizopolis (1996), his hilarious, endlessly creative mental breakdown of a vanity project. Full of ideas and self-amusement, It’s best imagined as Soderbergh’s...
Pride Month was ushered in this year by A Kid Like Jake, a tender adaptation of Daniel Pearle’s play about a 4-year-old boy who loves to dress up as princesses. His parents (wonderfully played by Jim Parsons and Claire Danes) struggle to navigate the thorny politics of rearing a gender...
Arguably the first mainstream American film to portray contemporary occultism in depth, Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby — released 50 years ago this month — premiered as a palpable fascination with the occult was taking hold. Based upon Ira Levin’s bestselling novel, various real-life...
Four movies deep and 20 degrees down, my brother and I were the last ones left at the Aut-O-Rama Twin. The only other survivor — a hardy family piled in and around a pickup truck — must’ve bailed while I was in the bathroom. When I shambled out of the brick bunker, under the red humming...
Given his scene-stealing work as Lando Calrissian in Solo: A Star Wars Story and the artistic poignancy of his masterwork music video “This is America,” it should surprise no one that when Donald Glover made his film debut in the very silly indie Mystery Team (2009), he was the MVP. As...
This month saw the passing of Philip Roth, as important — and no less controversial — a figure to the field of literature as Ty Cobb was to baseball, or Pablo Picasso was to painting. Considered by many to rank among the greatest American novelists of all time, Roth also accumulated a large...
The neo-noir was a genre closely identified with the ‘90s. By 1998, though, neo-noirs were a dime a dozen, with directors and screenwriters trying numerous ways to infuse something new into their takes; many tended to up the salaciousness factor in the hopes that titillation would bring in...
“If people had to choose, this summer, between seeing one dinosaur movie, much as I’m proud of Carnosaur, I would probably recommend Jurassic Park,” says Roger Corman with a happy-to-be-here smile on his face and a dinosaur puppet on his hand. “But, I think we can agree, that I would hope...
The English Romantic writer Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley lived about as cinematic a life as one could, filled with historic achievement, tortuous love, wild sex, radical politics, turbulent family drama, and one devastating personal tragedy after another. That the new film about her early adult...
FORD PREFECT: Oh, Zaphod, this is a friend of mine, Arthur Dent. I saved him when his planet blew up.
ZAPHOD BEEBLEBROX: Oh sure, hi, Arthur, glad you could make it.
FORD PREFECT: And Arthur, this is my—
ARTHUR DENT: We’ve met.
FORD PREFECT: What?
ZAPHOD BEEBLEBROX: Oh, er… have we?...
In 1975, Peter Weir’s debut film Picnic at Hanging Rock put Australia’s burgeoning art cinema squarely on the map, on its way to becoming a cult classic. Based on a novel by Joan Lindsay, the film has always had an air of “based on a true story” about it, despite its central mystery being a...
In 2008, 13-year-old Saoirse Ronan received her first Oscar nomination for Atonement, a British WWII melodrama based on an Ian McEwan novel about a fanciful girl named Briony Tallis who unwittingly unravels the lives of her sister Cecilia and Cecilia’s lover, Robbie, after accusing him of a crime...
Deadpool came in like a comet in 2016, grossing $783.1 million worldwide — fantastic for any movie, but unheard of for a hard-R superhero movie. Audiences responded to Ryan Reynolds’ Bugs-Bunny-on-meth take on the character, and to the way the film didn’t believe in a fourth wall and poked...
In Avengers: Infinity War, Josh Brolin is big and purple. His Thanos is the film’s lynchpin and its main character almost by default. Although his quest -- to halve the world’s population with a bunch of magical MacGuffins -- is fairly conventional for superhero fare, Brolin’s performance is...
