Dave Chappelle Is the Comedic Voice Trump’s America Deserves

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.”

Toni Erdmann Toasts the Hilarity of Everyday Humilitation

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…

The Magicians Pushes Fantasy to Its Limits

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…

Hamilton Is Finally Coming to South Florida

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.

The Pegasus World Cup Is the Perfect Race for Donald Trump’s America

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.

Rest in Peace, Mary Tyler Moore, Reluctant Feminist Icon

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…

Fire at Sea‘s Gianfranco Rosi on the Art of Finding What Matters

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…

Fire at Sea Reveals Parallel Lives as the Refugee Crisis Hits Italy

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…

Don’t Expect Gold to Set a New Standard for Crime Capers

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…

Pablo Larraín’s Neruda Fractures the Biopic

“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…

The Biggest Twist: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love M. Night Shyamalan

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…

M. Night Shyamalan’s Latest Is Neither Mess Nor Triumph

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…

Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson Shakes the Everyday for All Its Beauty

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,…