“We now break our usual third-person omniscient mode in service to a desperate first-person plea: Can somebody please make me a pair of .gifs of Rosa’s and Holt’s amazing mid-episode reaction shots during their ill-fated double date with Marcus and Kevin? Stephanie Beatriz and Andre Braugher are both great at wry humor and articulating hilarity … Continue reading
“Last night’s episode of The Comedians has a surprise twist to it: it’s actually pretty good. If you’ve given up on the show already (and it seems like everybody has), the siren call of a half hour of chuckles might not be enough to lure you back to the TV’s warm glow, but “The Red … Continue reading
“There may be no more fitting way to kick off a celebration of storytellers than with a portrait of a storyteller, so combining Independent Film Festival Boston with The End of the Tour feels simply felicitous. This is the second time a James Ponsoldt film has commenced festivities at New England’s largest film festival; he … Continue reading
“It’s hard to tell if Skin Trade should be taken seriously. Because it’s a movie about sex trafficking that ends with a title card displaying sobering sex trafficking statistics, but it’s also a movie that stars and is co-written by Dolph Lundgren. This ambiguity is the film’s most plangent trait: long before we ever get … Continue reading
“Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young kicks off with dialogue from The Master Builder, one of the most significant works of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. The text details an exchange between Halvard Solness, the architect of the play’s title, and Hilda, a young woman from Solness’s past who has arrived to assert herself in his present. … Continue reading
“Horror on a webcam” is neither a fresh aesthetic nor a new idea. Nacho Vigalondo’s unfortunately overcomplicated Open Windows and the 2012 omnibus joint V/H/S both use Skype chats to variable effect; if we want to duck genre, then it’s worth pointing out that Modern Family presented an entire episode using FaceTime as the stage … Continue reading
“The Comedians has yet to figure out what kind of show it wants to be. Granted, we’re only two episodes deep into its first season, and comedies tend to take more time to develop a consistent timbre from one installment to the next. Criticizing the series for being an amorphous blend of workplace comedy, behind … Continue reading
“If Tsai Ming-liang hadn’t beaten Nicolas Winding Refn’s career to the punch by several years, Rebels of the Neon God would have been a killer moniker for one of the great Dane’s as-yet-unimagined future projects. Even in that alternate timeline, though, Tsai’s debut feature comes from such a culturally specific place that only he could … Continue reading
“Thirty years ago, give or take, Toa Fraser’s The Dead Lands would have fit in nicely during the period’s boom of heroic fantasy films—Krull, Hawk the Slayer, Conan the Barbarian, Fire and Ice, The Sword and the Sorcerer—save for a paucity of camp. Not that The Dead Lands is an entirely somber affair, mind you, … Continue reading
“Ever blind-watched a movie just because you recognized its supporting cast? Have you ever thought to yourself, “Hey, I know this person from the secondary roles they’ve played in internationally prominent films!” and used that as justification to check out the random, obscure titles they spend most of their timing slumming it in? If so, … Continue reading
“Kornél Mundruczó’s White God begins with a surrealist canine nightmare that unfolds against the backdrop of abandoned urbanity: a young girl pedals through empty streets of Budapest on her bike, her trumpet poking out of the backpack slung over her shoulder. Suddenly, a horde of dogs, led by one especially determined mutt, comes barreling around … Continue reading
““When I found out Billy Crystal wanted to work with me, nobody was more excited than my grandparents.” If you’ve seen any kind of advertising for FX’s new “inside baseball” comedy series,The Comedians, you’ve almost certainly heard this particular line spoken from the mouth of Josh Gad, one of its leads. The joke appears to … Continue reading
“Making a romantic comedy in New York without referencing the works of Woody Allen or Neil Simon is a tall order. For decades, television, movies and music have extolled the Big Apple as a place where dreams come true, as a burg of endless amorous possibility. We’re well past the point where stories of young … Continue reading
Throughout most of his career, Glenn Morshower has been cast as a hard-nosed authority type more times than we can shake a stick at; from early roles in movies like Under Siege, In the Army Now, and Air Force One, to his appearances in Black Hawk Down, Pearl Harbor, the Transformers series (where he plays a military general named for him). And … Continue reading
“Seth Green is an industry veteran of roughly three decades, and the sort of actor who needs no introduction, but we’ll give him one anyways. You’ve seen him in movies and TV shows ranging from Idle Hands and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, to the Austin Powers films and Party Monster; you’ve heard his voice in Family … Continue reading
““What happens in Vermont, stays in Vermont. But nothing really happens.” If you’ve ever been to the Green Mountain State, or even if you haven’t, chances are you’ve seen this wisecrack printed on a bumper sticker or perhaps a T-shirt. To a generous degree, it’s true; Vermont is a peaceful place where life ambles along … Continue reading
“Can a single great performance elevate an otherwise middle-of-the-road movie? Judging by the recent big-screen efforts of Simon Curtis: absolutely. The British filmmaker made waves in 2011 with My Week With Marilyn, a movie held aloft by a tremendous turn from the luminous Michelle Williams, who spends the picture making everyone look better both in … Continue reading
“If While We’re Young leaves you itching to know whether the footage Adam Driver’s character shoots via a conspicuous GoPro camera will ever make it on the Blu-Ray as a special feature, prepare for disappointment: it’ll never see the light of day. “Part of the problem is that if we showed anything in Jamie’s movie … Continue reading
“When do wry race jokes stumble over the line and devolve into straight-up racism? People like Mel Brooks, Richard Pryor and Louis C.K. have proven that color barriers can indeed be funny, but only because those barriers beg to be broken down. Etan Cohen, director and co-writer on Get Hard, can’t even plant a single … Continue reading
“Don’t bother playing the “name that reference” game with Kristian Levring’s The Salvation; his film owes much to the titans of the Western archetype, but he makes few if any nods to them. For whatever reason, we tend to expect our genre films to pay visual or aural tribute to their sires as though homage … Continue reading
A Constant Visual Feast 