Did you know that the Disney villain Maleficent isn't a bitch? I didn't know that Maleficent isn't a bitch. I went to the movie bearing her name expecting to watch a bitch. I did not get a bitch. Life, though, for those 97 minutes was a bitch. I guess that's something.
"Did you know that it was an openly gay Englishman who's responsible for winning World War II?" asks Mark Ruffalo's Ned Weeks during one of many emotional high points in Ryan Murphy's HBO movie adaptation of The Normal Heart. "His name's Alan Turing and he cracked the Germans' Enigma code. After the war was over, he…
Jim Mickle's moody, genre-skipping film Cold in July opens on a terrifying home invasion and only gets crazier from there. Dexter's Michael C. Hall plays Richard, a man who's thrust into a situation he's in no way prepared for, and then finds himself seduced by it. He ends up pursing a path that blurs the line between…
I saw Godzilla earlier this week and have thought about it on my own precisely zero times since then. Gareth Edwards' take on the classic is as great-looking as it is dumb. It conveys enormity extremely well, as well should a movie that stars monsters who dwarf skyscrapers. For all of his twitching, nostril-flaring,…
Jeremy Saulnier's Blue Ruin spends its 92 minutes tightening itself around your neck and intermittently striking like a snake. Part genre flick, part meditative indie, Blue Ruin follows protagonist Dwight (Macon Blair) through mostly backwoods Virginia in his attempt to avenge the death of his parents after their…
Kate Upton's character in The Other Woman, Amber, is at one point referred to as "the boobs" by Cameron Diaz's Carly: "When you put the lawyer, the wife, and the boobs together, you have the perfect killing machine." The movie, in which a man's wife and two mistresses team up for imprecise revenge, treats Kate Upton…
Going into Dan Sickles and Antonio Santini's debut feature Mala Mala, I wondered if I was about to watch 2014's answer to Jennie Livingston's controversial classic Paris Is Burning.
The premise of Ira Sachs' sixth feature, Love Is Strange, recalls a type of story we read in the news with increasing frequency: George (Alfred Molina) marries his husband Ben (John Lithgow) and loses his job teaching at a Catholic school as a result. That sounds like a recipe for a heavy-handed message movie, but the…
Last year, Gary Poulter, one of the stars of David Gordon Green's new movie Joe, died in a homeless encampment in Austin. For Joe, Green had mixed non-professional actors with stars like Nicolas Cage (as Joe, a hero in his rural community who's this close to snapping) and up-and-comers like Tye Sheridan, as Gary, the…
Do you know who Bucky is? Do you remember a woman from the 2011's Captain America: The First Avenger movie who, now that we've shifted in time to present day, is deteriorating from old age and bad movie makeup?
Jennifer Kent's Australian thriller The Babadook is of the big success stories from this year's Sundance Film Festival. The story seems standard enough: A boogieman character named the Babadook terrorizes a single mother, Amelia (Essie Davis) and her son Samuel (Noah Wiseman), who's so poorly behaved, he's a bit of a…
Legendary director Alejando Jodorowsky's Dune has built up a multi-decade reputation as a great production that never was. Now, thanks to Frank Pavich's documentary on the subject, we can see as complete a picture as possible of what could have been—a brilliantly insane undertaking.
"You've come a long way to stroke your cock watching real men train," says Sparta's Queen Gorgo (Game of Thrones' Lena Headey) to Themistocles (Sullivan Stapleton), the Athenian protagonist of 300: Rise of an Empire. This serves as a quick lesson in how to watch this thing, director Noam Murro's not-quite-sequel to…
It is a particular treat to see a Hayao Miyazaki movie on the big screen, and the Japanese animator's latest is no exception. The Wind Rises is as gorgeous as any Studio Ghibli production, crisp and pastel, soothing and stunning. Rife with dream sequences of impossibly layered aircraft against perfect skies dolloped…
"Cultural appropriation" is usually understood as a one-way street: A privileged outsider steals from a disenfranchised group and eats the profits. This is an easy enough narrative, but the truth is generally more complicated—see Little Richard's gratitude for Elvis Presley as an "integrator." Or take James Franco and…
Sometimes during the course of a year, pop cultural objects end up slipping through Gawker's cracks. Sometimes I see a movie late. Sometimes I don't have a whole review's worth of a response in me. Sometimes I need a minute to digest, and then once that minute passes, it feels like I'm too late. Sometimes it's really…
G.B.F. is a good-natured teen comedy about prom queens in search of gay best friends. Its depictions of affection are chaste and its language is clean. So why does it have an R rating?
I have never seen anyone cry so openly and in such volume as I did when I attended a press screening of The Best Man Holiday earlier this week with my coworker Caity Weaver. (Given our shared love of all things Christmasy, cheesy, and Christmasy cheesy, she was the natural choice to be my +1.) Malcolm D. Lee's…
Frederick Wiseman is a master of the art of documentary. Since 1967’s sensational Titicut Follies, the 83-year-old has made films, focused on American institutions, that don’t use narration, interviews, or identifying chyrons to tell their stories. These stories, in fact, are only implicitly narrative. They are often…
A few years ago, I was idly talking to a group of friends about Andrew Holleran's 1978 novel Dancer from the Dance. The book elegantly describes the gay culture of Manhattan and Fire Island at the time it was written, and in doing so shares some sentiment that reads less than politically correct to modern…
