In Mexico, the Día de Muertos tradition celebrates life, but also the travels of the dearly departed. Here are three death-themed Mexican films that prioritize spiritual clarity and cultural education, each in its own unique way. México Bárbaro (2014, on Netflix) provocatively captures Día de Muertos’ effect on pop culture. The two-hour anthology film addresses […]
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For maximum nostalgia, Mid90s is presented not in widescreen but in 4:3, the way it would have looked on TV or videotape back in the day. “Maximum nostalgia” is the motivating factor for almost everything in Jonah Hill’s directorial debut (which he also wrote), a coming-of-age comedy set among adolescent skater boys in Southern California in […]
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Johnny English, Rowan Atkinson’s bumbling James Bond character who is a more talkative version of his Mr. Bean character, returns for a third outing in Johnny English Strikes Again, a family-friendly spy spoof whose only flaw is that it has zero interest in the characters who aren’t Johnny English. This time around, Johnny is brought […]
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The premise behind Ike Barinholtz’s dark comedy The Oath is ripe with possibilities: A liberal man and his wife host his conservative relatives for Thanksgiving week, which coincides with a particularly divisive political issue tearing the country apart. There’s comedic tension in everyone trying to stay civil, followed by comedic release when civility fails. In the […]
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In the 35 years Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes were married (from 1954 until his death in 1989), she starred in seven of the dozen features he directed and appeared un-billed in two others. With their outsized characterizations and heightened emotions (fueled, more often than not, by heavy alcohol consumption), Cassavetes’ films were showcases for […]
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The rather arbitrarily titled Hunter Killer is a submarine movie for dads, based on a novel called Firing Point (another random title) that looks like it is probably only for sale in airports. The dividing line on movies of this nature is thin and extremely subjective, but for me Hunter Killer is just simple-headed enough to hit the […]
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It takes its time getting there, but you know The Hate U Give is going to turn serious on us because it starts with our narrator, 16-year-old Starr Carter (Amandla Stenberg), telling us about the time when she was 9 and her dad gave her The Talk — not the sex talk, but the one black […]
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See, they’re a couple of brothers whose last name is Sisters. “The Sisters brothers.” Get it? As a novel, much of what made The Sisters Brothers so entertaining was author Patrick DeWitt’s amusingly dry way with words, his knack for turning a phrase. You’re bound to lose some of that with any film adaptation, but this […]
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It’s Halloween week, and you know what that means! You forgot to buy candy for the trick-or-treaters! Also you’re probably knee-deep in horror movies because that’s how late October works for movie nerds: We are beholden to watch at least a few extra horror flicks. Now would be a good time to head out to […]
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Like any good Gen Xer, I trace my love of horror movies to the made-for-TV movies of the 1970s. Inspired by cinematic blockbusters like Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Devil Rides Out — and by an establishment-averse zeitgeist thrumming with interest in astrology, the tarot and other occult arts — television’s three big networks […]
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Screenlife — the screen-capture-style gimmick-turned-medium used in movies like Unfriended (2014) and Searching (2018) — feels like a textbook bad idea. The style was largely pioneered by Russian director and producer Timur Bekmambetov, whose studio, Bazelevs, developed technology to propel production of movies told through laptops, phones, or tablets and has since gone all in churning […]
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In the parlance of rock-climbers, to “free solo” means to climb alone and without a rope — basically, to remove all margin for error. If you make a mistake, you die. What you must keep reminding yourself while watching the documentary Free Solo — about a man training to ascend one of the world’s most challenging […]
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