In 2006, during an interview with Oprah Winfrey, Dave Chappelle told his onetime sketch-comedy target: “I was doing sketches that were funny but socially irresponsible. I felt like I was deliberately being encouraged, and I was overwhelmed. It’s like you’re being flooded with things and you don’t pay attention to things like your ethics.”
First, the good news: The dog doesn’t die in John Wick: Chapter 2. This will come as a relief to some of us who adored the original, an action masterpiece about a retired hitman taking unholy revenge on the Russian scumbags who killed his pup and stole his car. The…
Given that it’s a sequel/spinoff built around a mostly throwaway gag in The LEGO Movie, The LEGO Batman Movie is funnier than you might think it has any right to be. But those of us who were expecting something more can’t help but feel a twinge of disappointment. The LEGO…
Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman is a tense, visceral drama of wounded masculinity — and therein lies part of its problem. Farhadi, whose About Elly and A Separation are two of the greatest movies of the past decade, can find tension in the most mundane of exchanges, and he…
Contemporary American horror’s obsession with morality and psychotherapy can really be a downer. In 2002, Gore Verbinski expertly remade the J-horror hit Ringu with a layered story about a single mother (Naomi Watts) who watches a cursed videotape. To stop the curse, she travels through the warped psyche of the…
Delving into microeconomics and macroaggressions, Toni Erdmann, the dynamite, superbly acted third feature by writer/director Maren Ade, is social studies at its finest. This quicksilver, emotionally astute comedy operates on many different registers and moods: Whoopee cushions and gag teeth are part of the fun, but so too is a…
We can credit our new president, Donald Trump, with one thing right off the bat: Ever since he announced his run for the White House, he’s helped boost the employment numbers — mainly for comedians who found new material.
The title offers the first clue about what’s off. Calling this movie The Comedian suggests that Robert De Niro will be playing something definitive or archetypal, as if there’s just one kind of stand-up comic, as if he’s representing a genus rather than embodying someone singular. A glut of other…
Take it from the network that rebranded as Syfy: The best trick in The Magicians is its phoniness. The actors share a broad house-style stiltedness and uniform, plasticine good looks — even the same haircut. The sets, costumes and special effects, while often inventive (a baddie with a head made…
South Florida fans of the insanely popular musical Hamilton have felt snubbed this year. The touring production announced visits to metro areas such as Salt Lake City and Des Moines but skipped Miami and Fort Lauderdale. The closest local Hamilfans could get was last month’s auditions held at Florida International University. Until now.
When Gulfstream Park owner Frank Stronach conceived the Pegasus World Cup in early 2016, little could he have known that Donald Trump would be sworn in as president of the United States roughly a year later. But here we are, with an ostentatious reality-show realtor in the Oval Office and a track with a 110-foot statue of a winged horse crushing a dragon welcoming spectators to the richest race in thoroughbred history. The confluence is uncanny.
Mary Tyler Moore, who died Wednesday at 80, was a reluctant feminist. She wouldn’t even call herself one at all. In 1970, when Moore embodied the character of flighty, 30-year-old single TV news producer Mary Richards on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, there was no other such woman portrayed on…
The entire time Gianfranco Rosi is talking, he’s drawing. Using a graphite pencil against an unlined notebook, the Italian documentary filmmaker instinctively makes quick sketches to illustrate his ideas and anecdotes. Counting off the number of windows on a ship, he draws three little squares. Talking about the deathly Mediterranean…
A Dog’s Purpose, based on the novel by W. Bruce Cameron, combines the philosophical belief that living beings are reborn into a different physical body after biological death with the voiceover narrative technique of Look Who’s Talking. The main character, Dog, dies in multiple wrenching scenes and is subsequently reborn;…
There are two distinct movies in Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire at Sea, and you could say that somewhere in between them lies the real one. The director, an Italian documentarian whose observational films demonstrate a formal rigor that often brings them close to experimental cinema and installation work, has trained his…
Gold’s value lies chiefly in the hearts and minds of those who seek it. The noble metal has driven humans to perpetrate ignoble acts on their quests to unearth it since at least 5000 B.C.E., when slaves divined for golden veins to lavish their Pharaohs with jewelry. The Incas even…
Quick, name an Archie Andrews personality trait. Yes, he’s red-headed and red-blooded, a horndog naïf with hashtag sideburns who is forever battled over by beauties he can’t be bothered to get anywhere with. But beyond that — who is he? Sometimes he’s in a sugar-sweet pop combo. Sometimes he tools…
“Art is a lie that tells a truth,” Pablo Picasso once said. The aphorism animates Pablo Larraín’s canny and vigorous Neruda, a sidelong biopic of the preeminent Chilean poet and politician, featuring a brilliant Luis Gnecco in the title role, that’s equal parts fact and fiction. (Conversely, Larraín’s film also…
I’m still trying to decide if Sundance’s decision to kick off its 2017 festival with An Inconvenient Sequel, Al Gore’s follow-up to his influential (and terrifying) climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth, is an act of political confrontation or a sign of helplessness. (Or both?) What kind of message does…
M. Night Shyamalan appears again to be having a moment. His last film, 2015’s grandparents-gone-wrong horror flick The Visit, proved a small hit with critics and audiences alike, and his latest, this week’s multiple-personality abduction thriller Split, seems poised to do likewise. And why not? Both films are effective chillers…
Despite his reputation, M. Night Shyamalan has never lived and died by the twist. His best films, like Unbreakable or even last year’s cheerily nasty wicked-grandparents thriller The Visit, work first as accomplished, emotionally engaging suspense. What’s most memorable about them isn’t the final-act revelations or even the quietly impressive…
Walking out of Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson last May at Cannes, I felt like it was the closest the director had come to making an artistic manifesto. Having seen it again, I’m even more convinced. Jarmusch first arrived in New York back in the 1970s with dreams of becoming a poet,…
