How a political film should aim to make you feel is a tricky question. There’s the Ken Loach approach, worthy and moving but, in this overcrowded landscape, arguably not fashioned to persuade (or even attract) those viewers not already on-side, and there’s the fast-paced Armando Iannucci satire, in which hypocrisies are gleefully punctured and the […]
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“Everybody knows that the dice are loaded,” sang Leonard Cohen, who died the day before Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, which he had confidently predicted. “Everybody knows the fight was fixed / The poor stay poor, the rich get rich / That’s how it goes / Everybody knows.” It’s hard to imagine a phrase more evocative […]
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There’s laziness, there’s racism, and there’s lazy racism. About 45 minutes into IT: Chapter Two, which remained atop the box office last weekend, the three-hour movie reveals it’s aiming for the latter. For this sequel to the 2017 film, Argentinian director Andrés Muschietti was tasked with interpreting an epic, and epically weird, work. Like with most adaptations, there was […]
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On Saturday, HBO’s harrowing Michael Jackson documentary, Leaving Neverland, was awarded a Creative Arts Emmy for Best Documentary or Non-Fiction Special. After the win, the film’s director Dan Reed took a moment backstage to finally respond to Dave Chappelle’s recent jokes about Jackson’s accusers—and called them “completely revolting,” The Wrap reports. Chappelle’s latest Netflix special, […]
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A brand-new trailer for Mike Flanagan’s Shining sequel Doctor Sleep is here, and it looks like the Overlook is still the world’s worst hotel. In the new two-and-a-half-minute clip released by Warner Bros. on Sunday, a grown-up Danny Torrance, played by Ewan McGregor, heads back to the now-abandoned Overlook Hotel to discover that, well, it […]
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It looks like actor-slash-“Purple Rain” karaoke legend Nicolas Cage loved Hereditary and Midsommar just as much as the rest of us—because now he wants to work with director Ari Aster on a new movie, IndieWire reports. Cage sat down for an interview at Toronto International Film Festival to discuss his career, how he chooses his […]
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Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker movie just won the coveted Golden Lion award at the 2019 Venice Film Festival—and between this and all those gushing early reviews, this one seems destined for the Oscars. It’s no huge surprise that Joker took home the festival’s top honor. The film was apparently met with an eight-minute standing ovation after […]
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“This is a story about control.” Janet Jackson’s trademark whisper echoes on screen with soft ferocity as the opening images from Hustlers appear. A beautiful Asian woman sits in front of a mirror surrounded by lingerie-clad bombshells preening and primping themselves and each other. “And this time / I’m gonna do it my way.” She […]
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Dolemite Is My NamePhoto: Courtesy of TIFF Are you runnin’ through The Six with your cinematic woes? Well, you’re in luck, because it’s time for the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF)! Much like myself—who will be reviewing films from the fest this year for The Root—a bunch of Americans will be descending upon America’s […]
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Joker won’t come out in America until October 4, but after its Venice premiere this week a critical maelstrom is already aswirl. Joaquin Phoenix plays Arthur Fleck—the Joker before he was the Joker—a mentally ill and broke man with a warped relationship with his mother. The trailers suggest Phoenix has brought all his febrile abilities […]
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It only took 16 years, but the official trailer for Bad Boys for Life is finally here and we’re all better for it. In these two minutes and 30 seconds of rapture, our lord and savior Will Smith and the legendary Martin Lawrence reprise their roles as Miami Police detectives Mike Lowrey and Marcus Burnett […]
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Matthew McConaughey almost drowns to death in a tragic accident involving a leaky roof, shrubbery, some questionable interviewing methods, and Zach Galifianakis. When the Oscar-winning actor and star of such acclaimed films as Ghosts of Girlfriends Past and Surfer, Dude nearly meets his untimely end, someone has to pay. And the only logical way to […]
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I have always thought of conspiracy theories—whether spawned by the assassination of JFK, the death of Marilyn Monroe, or more recently, the suicide of Jeffrey Epstein in his Manhattan jail cell—as an easy, somewhat credulous intellectual refuge, a way of trying to fit the pieces of a jagged and perplexing reality into a smooth and […]
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Well, here we go, everybody. Joaquin Phoenix’s gritty, R-rated Joker origin movie made its world premiere at Venice International Film Festival this weekend—and people fully loved it, apparently. The movie is already pulling in early Oscar buzz, with Deadline calling it a “bravura piece of filmmaking that speaks to the world we are actually living […]
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The last three Terminator sequels were so heinous, so egregiously stupid, so brain-bleedingly convoluted that we should probably just dump the whole franchise in a vat of molten metal and call it a day. But still, as bad as those movies were, it’s hard not to get at least a little bit excited about the […]
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Richard Linklater has always liked playing with time. He kicked off his career with a movie that takes place over the course of a single day. The original version of Dazed and Confused was structured around the time it would take for a carload of people to listen to an eight-track of ZZ Top’s Fandango! […]
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In her 2010 book The Promise of Happiness, the scholar Sara Ahmed describes the “happiness duty” as an expectation levied on immigrants by the liberal ideas of multiculturalism. In return for full acceptance, Western democratic societies demand that immigrants enthusiastically acquiesce to a new nation’s cultural values. (For a recent example, look no further than […]
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Showtime’s latest documentary Hitsville: The Making of Motown starts off with a jaw-dropping opening scene. Crackling in the background is audio from founder Berry Gordy as he leads one of the record label’s famed quality-control meetings, where employees discuss the upcoming release calendar. The caliber of artists he lists off is astounding: Marvin Gaye, The […]
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America now divides into two classes: those who have lived with social media–laden smartphones since childhood, and the rest of us. Note how we elders are now the exception, rather than the rule, since our time will never come again. A profound and irreversible change in the grain of ordinary life has taken place, and […]
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Warner Bros. has been teasing a Matrix reboot since 2017, when Michael B. Jordan was supposedly in talks to star, but details around the project have been scarce. Or they were, until now. On Tuesday, the studio officially announced that the new Matrix film is officially headed into production in 2020—and it’s going to bring […]
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