Who gets to make country music? Who gets to define what’s authentic and what’s appropriative? These questions have dogged alt-country — itself a reaction to pop-country pablum that’s taken over the mainstream — since its early ’90s rise. Forget what the gatekeepers would have you believe: The runaway success of singer-songwriters like Gillian Welch (a […]
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It’s no secret that a biopic is the surest route to Oscar love. Academy voters need only catch a glimpse of artfully applied facial prosthetics and hear an actor’s best impression of a historical figure, and they’re swooning. But considering how critically well-regarded and frequently made biopics are, it’s shocking how many of them wildly […]
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(Editor’s Corner is where Eric talks about overlooked gems, film history, or whatever he wants to talk about because he’s the boss and no one can stop him.) Have you ever seen the movie where King Arthur and Henry Higgins (or, if you prefer, Mark Antony and Julius Caesar) play a bickering but affectionate old […]
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Well, folks — we’re now batting two for two when it comes to summer comic book movies and their (wildly superficial) attempts to dismantle the patriarchy one franchise at a time. “You might want to think about changing the name to X-Women,” Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) said in last week’s depressingly abysmal Dark Phoenix, and this […]
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The new Shaft, starring Jessie T. Usher as anxious FBI data analyst John Shaft, is a direct sequel to the 2000 Shaft, which starred Samuel L. Jackson as badass police detective John Shaft, who was the nephew of Richard Roundtree’s original John Shaft from 1971, the one that was a sex machine to all the […]
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Jim Jarmusch’s films are frequently populated by richly drawn characters who move through the world at a pace that could generously be described as languid (so languid, in fact, that they often take some time to enter his shots). And until now, that’s never been a problem — in fact, it’s been part of his […]
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A new film entitled Shaft is being released this month, and thus the Shaft series joins the rare and dubious club of movie franchises that contain multiple entries with the same title. If audiences aren’t confused by that, they may be by the marketing, as the trailers make Shaft 2019 appear to be a comedy. […]
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Taking a cue from Disney — which makes sense, given the Mouse’s involvement here — writer-director Simon Kinberg jarringly opens Dark Phoenix on a full-on Bambi note for 8-year-old Jean Gray, who has unique telekinetic and and telepathic abilities she’s not fully in control of. It’s seemingly impossible to draft up a superhero (or princess) […]
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If you live in L.A. and have writer friends connected to the TV world, you’ve likely heard phrases like “diversity hire” bandied about by well-off white-dude acquaintances more times that you can count. If you live anywhere and have zero friends connected to the TV world, you’ve still probably been present for an uncomfortable #MeToo-focused […]
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Coming on the heels of its shaky predecessor, The Secret Life of Pets 2 is a mild, playful surprise with the confidence of a long-running franchise. This week’s other new movie, Dark Phoenix, feels like a TV show in a bad way, but TSLOP2 feels like one in a good way, with a sitcom-structured plot […]
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1999 is considered one of the strongest years of cinema in living memory. There will no doubt be countless articles in 2019 marking the 20th anniversaries of that year’s greatest hits and examining their impact and legacy. But this column isn’t about those movies. This column is about the overlooked gems from 1999 — the […]
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Look, we’ve got to get one thing out of the way here. If you go into Ma expecting incisive commentary on American racial relations mixed into your horror (the film is content to only go surface-level in this regard), you’re going to be sorely disappointed. The film was directed by Tate Taylor — he of […]
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