Ian McEwan’s novel On Chesil Beach and the movie based on it (which he also wrote) tell a story set in 1962 England that could only work as a period piece, for it is based on the premise that society expects newlyweds to be virgins, and that many of them actually are. The big-screen debut of […]
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Remember the Robert Redford movie All Is Lost, where he was stranded at sea? Adrift, with teen-romance veterans Shailene Woodley (The Fault in Our Stars) and Sam Claflin (Me Before You) lost in the Pacific on a storm-damaged yacht, is like that, only boring. It’s based on real events recounted in Tami Ashcraft’s book Sky […]
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If the absence of Johnny Knoxville’s Jackass has left a concussion-shaped hole in your life, it may be partially filled by Action Point, a juvenile comedy with Knoxville as the owner of a rickety amusement park who tries to compete with a fancy new park by embracing what makes his unique and removing all the safety […]
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Upgrade is an offbeat futuristic techno-thriller in the tradition of B-movies about scientists tampering in God’s domain, made with enthusiasm (by Saw and Insidious creator Leigh Whannell) from the spare parts of other sci-fi stories. It has some clumsy dialogue and melodrama, but it also has enough tongue-in-cheek ingenuity and kinetic energy to compensate for it. We are […]
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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 one-third of Derrick Comedy, […]
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“This is not based on a true story,” say the onscreen titles at the beginning of American Animals. “This is a true story.” A bold assertion, but writer-director Bart Layton, whose previous film was the unbelievably engrossing documentary Impostor, makes a strong case for himself with his narrative debut, an account of a 2004 incident […]
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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 share of […]
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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 audiences. But in the case of Don […]
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While I’ve always liked the original Star Wars trilogy, I don’t have the depth of knowledge (i.e., memorization) that some do, so there are probably references in the Han Solo prequel, Solo: A Star Wars Story, that I didn’t catch. That’s besides the obvious ones, which kind of poke you in the face, as when Lando […]
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Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg started to become a pop-culture icon a few years ago, when the court shifted rightward and she found herself writing more dissents — scathing ones, often, on subjects that America was newly (re-)interested in, like women’s issues and minority rights. The Internet dubbed her “Notorious R.B.G.,” Kate McKinnon started […]
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“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 that people would see […]
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