Chilean director Pablo Larraín’s new movie The Club makes last year’s Spotlight look like kids’ stuff. It depicts a house of former priests (and their caretaker, a former nun), who live in exile in a small house on the Chilean coast. Soon after the arrival of a new housemate, a man accusing the new arrival of…
In my experience, the highlight of Matthew Barney’s 351-minute movie River of Fundament, occurs a little more than three hours in, when we’re treated to a close-up shot of greenish diarrhea leaking out of a butthole. That’s powerful imagery and I’ve never seen anything quite like it before.
Alan Turing is a prime example of the kind of historical figure people cite as proof that one's sexuality has no bearing on one's accomplishments. Turing essentially invented the computer and formalized much that comes with it, including the algorithm and the concept of artificial intelligence. According to Winston…
The girl of Ana Lily Amirpour's A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is not like other girls. She is, for one thing, a vampire, but she's not like other vampires, either. She wears a hijab and prowls the fictional Iranian town called Bad City (actually Bakersfield, Calif.). Her inevitable feeding seems to come as much…
A few years ago, OWN's Our America with Lisa Ling profiled ex-gays and the gay-conversion industry. Ex-gays tend to arouse the ire of gays and their allies because of what their life path implies: that homosexuality is changeable if one tries hard enough. Thus by not putting effort into being straight, one is…
Frederick Wiseman has been making his brand of long, implicitly narrative documentaries about institutions for almost 50 years, and I’ll be damned if his most recent, National Gallery, isn’t among his very finest. The movie, which opens today at New York’s Film Forum, examines the London art museum after which it is…
"I don't know what I'm saying. My face is melting off. I didn't even answer anything, I just said a bunch of words," admitted Emma Stone on Monday night, sitting on a panel with three of her Birdman co-stars after a screening of their film, as part of the 92nd St. Y's Reel Pieces with Annette Insdorf series. Those…
Imagine a world in which humorous, sharp conversations about race and identity could be had where multiple perspectives are represented—and many of the participants make good points.
This post contains some information about the movie The Skeleton Twins that could be considered spoilers. It's a great movie, and you should see it without knowing too much about it, so enter at your own risk.
Willis Earl Beale wore a Zorro-esque mask, probably the one you see in the picture above, throughout my discussion with him and director Tim Sutton (Pavilion) about their movie Memphis earlier this week. "Identity," he said, when I inquired about it. "We all wear masks anyway. It's a part of my whole thing." In…
Megan Fox doesn't eat carbs, but her Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles character April O'Neil feeds them to small turtles. How twisted is that?
...But hands off, it's mine!
The great service of Tracy Droz Tragos and Andrew Droz Palermo's film Rich Hill is that it makes accessible stories that are so often willfully ignored. The documentary winner of Sundance's Grand Jury Prize profiles three boys: Andrew, 13, Harley, 15, and Appachey, 12, who live in Rich Hill, Missouri, a town of…
Luc Besson's Lucy is a movie about a woman who can access 100 percent of her brain that asks you the viewer to use less of yours. The premise is based on the oft-repeated fallacy that humans only use 10 percent of their brains, and if we could only harness our full capacity, we'd be enlightened gods. Not only is…
James DeMonaco's The Purge: Anarchy has a high concept, and it is in over its head. The film is set in 2023, picking up one year after the events of last year's highly profitable The Purge ($89 million global gross, versus a $3 million budget), which DeMonaco also wrote and directed. As that flick did, Anarchy is…
The first time I saw Richard Linklater's Boyhood, it won me over within 30 minutes of its almost three-hour duration—around the time that Ethan Hawke shows up and gently subverts the deadbeat-dad role we've been set up to expect from him. His kids—the film's protagonist, Mason (Ellar Coltrane), and his sister…
Melissa McCarthy's titular Tammy character is dumb and fat. We watch her suffer various indignities related to these conditions for just about the entire running time of Tammy. The movie starts out brutally: We open on Tammy driving a car that's at least 20 years old, blasting the Outfield's "Your Love" from a…
I spent the last 20 minutes of William Eubank's intimate sci-fi thriller The Signal with my jaw hanging open. The movie's a slow burn that keeps its characters in the dark about what the hell is happening to them. Eubank's greatest feat is that he keeps the audience in the dark, too (or at least, this member of the…
In 2014, a story about AIDS in San Francisco in 1985 is as relevant as ever. Though it shares subject matter, Chris Mason Johnson's Test is the virtual antithesis of Ryan Murphy and Larry Kramer's survey of the early plague years, The Normal Heart, which aired last month on HBO. Test is smaller in scale, more…
It doesn't matter what old people like me think of Josh Boone's The Fault in Our Stars. It's going to be modern classic whether we're with it or against it. It's a triumph of the human spirit and unregulated cell growth. It's for teens to believe in, and it's been a while since teens have had something to believe in.…
