“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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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 years, Mary Shelley, is (according to the overwhelming critical consensus) a […]
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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? Hey… FORD PREFECT: What […]
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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 […]
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The imaginatively titled Book Club, about four women in their late 60s whose love lives are rekindled by reading the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, sounds like an extended advertisement for the books, but it really isn’t. It’s just the catalyst for an even drearier formula: a story about four old friends that’s basically a dirty […]
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What distinguishes Deadpool from most other superheroes is that he swears, kills people, and breaks the fourth wall. That is also, of course, what distinguished the first Deadpool film from its dozens of siblings way back in 2016. Deadpool 2 grapples with the question all sequels face — what now? — and comes up with the usual […]
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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 he did not commit. Ten years later, […]
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