Superhero films became increasingly sophisticated and decidedly darker as they become (for better or worse) a full-fledged genre in the 2000s. With Batman Begins, writer/director Christopher Nolan (drawing inspiration from the revisionist Batman comic books by Frank Miller and Jeph Loeb) rebooted the Batman mythos for the big screen, bringing the often lighthearted hero back […]
The aliens arrived almost thirty years ago, their crippled spacecraft hovering to a halt over Johannesburg, where it remains floating over the city. That defining image hovers over the entirety of District 9 (2009), a savagely whipsmart satire of first contact with an alien species that has been reduced to repressed immigrant population stranded in […]
Ewan McGregor is The Ghost Writer (2010), a scribe-for-hire in the celebrity autobiography business who is contracted to rewrite the dry memoirs of a former British Prime Minister (Pierce Brosnan), in the smart, gripping, subtly Hitchcockian thriller from director Roman Polanski and author Robert Harris. The writer has no other name in the film—he introduces […]
Here’s what’s new and ready to stream now on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO Now, video-on-demand, and other streaming services … Michael Sheen is an epicurean angel and David Tennant a rebellious demon who team up to stop Armageddon in the Amazon Original limited series Good Omens (2019), a comic fantasy scripted by Neil Gaiman […]
June brings the debut of the much-awaited third season of Hulu’s Emmy-winning The Handmaid’s Tale with Elisabeth Moss and the Oscar-nominated political satire Vice starring Christian Bale as Dick Cheney. Also coming in June is pop music drama Vox Lux with Natalie Portman, Juliet, Naked with Chris O’Dowd, Rose Byrne and Ethan Hawke, The Spy Who […]
Knocked Up (2007), Judd Apatow’s follow-up to The 40-Year-Old Virgin, finds few virgins on hand. Seth Rogen is likable, laid-back slacker schlub Ben (an early version of what has become his stock in trade role), whose one night stand with the gorgeous Alison (Katherine Heigl), a TV production assistant on the road to an on-air […]
Here’s what’s new and ready to stream now on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO Now, video-on-demand, and other streaming services … Winner of three Academy Awards (including best picture), Moonlight (2016, R) is a poetic and provocative portrait of a young black child, the sensitive, bullied son of a crack-addict single mom in a tough […]
There is a particular kind of challenge to making a movie tethered to a single, self-contained location where the dialogue is conducted almost entirely over the phone and the story plays out in real time. When it works—and look no farther than Steven Knight’s Locke (2013) with Tom Hardy navigating a life-altering action while driving […]
The Furies (1950), the second western from genre giant Anthony Mann (after Devil’s Doorway) and his first big-budget, large-canvas production after an apprenticeship in low-budget thrillers, is a genre hybrid: a psychological western by way of a Gothic melodrama, with a dark, shadowy style right out of Mann’s earlier film noirs. Barbara Stanwyck is Vance […]
Here’s what’s new and ready to stream now on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO Now, video-on-demand, and other streaming services … Christopher Abbott is John Yossarian, a bomber pilot trying to survive both the violence and the insanity of in World War II, in the six-part Hulu miniseries Catch-22. George Clooney produces, codirects, and costars […]
