(In theaters and on Netflix.) It was inevitable that a former teen star from the Disney Channel would eventually play a serial killer, if not actually become one. Zac Efron, whose breakout performance in High School Musical was more than 13 years ago, is good as Ted Bundy in Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, […]
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Her Smell – writer-director Alex Ross Perry’s latest abrasive outing – opens with an oddly comforting image. We meet rock trio Something She in the early ’90s as they’re celebrating an appearance on the cover of Spin magazine before we cut abruptly to a few years later. The group’s front-woman, Becky Something (Elisabeth Moss), has […]
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Amazing Grace, Aretha Franklin’s 1972 double-album of gospel songs, was the top-selling record of her career and the bestselling live gospel album of all time. (There might have been more live gospel albums than you realize.) It was recorded over two nights at a Baptist church in L.A.’s Watts neighborhood, filmed by director Sydney Pollack […]
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In theory, I would absolutely love to see a comedy starring Diane Keaton, Pam Grier, and Rhea Perlman that hits out against the agist, sexist societal impulses that seek to relegate women into some sort of cosmic cast-off pile once they’re deemed “too old” to be appreciated (read: objectified). Lord only knows what they have […]
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The story and premise of The Hustle are so elegant in their simplicity that it’s no surprise this film has already been made twice: first as Bedtime Story (1964), with Marlon Brando and David Niven, then as Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988), with Steve Martin and Michael Caine. Directed by British TV guy Chris Addison and […]
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As neither a child of the ’90s, a current child, or a person who has ever played Pokemon, I am not the target audience for Pokemon: Detective Pikachu, a kid-focused, live-action PG adventure that assumes viewers are already familiar with Pokemon lore and have no unresolved questions. If you’re unclear on the relationship between Pokemon […]
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Like many VHS junkies of the ‘90s, my introduction to the Caped Crusader did not come from a comic book or campy television drama, but, rather, the weekend video rental. I vividly recall watching Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) as a youth and hearing that powerful, simple statement: “I’m Batman” — suddenly, I wanted to walk, […]
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Long Shot has the skeleton of a romantic comedy, but the flesh on those bones has a lot of flavors: political satire, odd-couple comedy, celebrity culture, and ’90 nostalgia, to name a few. The screenwriters are Dan Sterling, who wrote Seth Rogen and James Franco’s North Korea movie The Interview, and Liz Hannah, who co-wrote […]
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As is increasingly the case in modern cinema, groups underrepresented onscreen are having their stories told more frequently and more honestly than before. Women in particular were very well represented both in front of and behind the camera at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. As a result, there were a number of films that dealt […]
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The Ringer declared last summer that the moment of horror is now here: “Millennial” is no longer a synonym for “young person.” The new cohort, dubbed “Gen Z” or “iGen” depending on who you ask, continues to rise after 2018’s generation-defining cry for action that culminated in the March for Our Lives. This year’s Tribeca Film […]
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Dependency can be horrifying. The feeling that your life would suffer irreparable damage if someone or something were removed from it creates a dread all its own. That particular terror permeates a handful of films at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival — not necessarily all “horror films” (we’d have to check with the @itishorror Twitter […]
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The only way to enjoy The Intruder, a mediocre domestic thriller with a plot that’s entirely predictable (and totally spelled out in the trailer) is to pretend it has more subtext than it does. Viewed in a certain way, for example, it could be seen as the story of how white, conservative, gun-loving Baby Boomers […]
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