Sometimes a movie seems like it was more fun to make than it is to watch. Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates is one of those movies. Zac Efron and Adam DeVine are Dave and Mike Stangle, two troublemaking brothers with a knack for walking the tightrope of party-makers/breakers. With…
During the early morning hours of June 12, a man armed with a semi-automatic rifle burst into the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, killing 49 club-goers and injuring 53 more. The tragedy was particularly hurtful for many, including Ates Isildak, because the shooting occurred inside what’s considered a “safe space” for…
A wiener dog is the perfect mascot for Todd Solondz’s films. Dachshunds are ridiculous, funny without trying, but that zero-dignity waddle belies a much fiercer purpose: to hunt and kill small prey. Solondz’s body of work, stretching from coming-of-age cringefest Welcome to the Dollhouse to his newest, Wiener-Dog, has the…
If there’s a war movie we haven’t seen enough of yet, it’s one from the female perspective, one that further obscures who the good guys and bad guys really are. In Anne Fontaine’s moody feature The Innocents, even the nuns are gray. During a bitterly cold winter, tucked away in…
In one of many throwaway gags in The Secret Life of Pets, a group of dogs gathering for an all-important rescue operation is momentarily sidetracked by a butterfly, which sends them into a riot of leaping and yelping. Pets are easily distracted, you see. And you know who else is…
James DeMonaco’s Purge series, about a near future in which all crime is legal for one annual 12-hour period, began as a disturbing setup for basic genre thrills: 2013’s franchise-starter was essentially a home-invasion thriller with a dystopian twist. By the time Purge: Anarchy rolled around a year later, the…
“My message to the comedians who let a bad audience reaction get them down? ‘Cheer up! You’re an entertainer, for God’s sake!’” Native Floridian, Ethan Moore, “grinds” the open mic scene (slang for doing as many unpaid gigs as one can in a week for the express purpose of polishing jokes). “The…
In cinema, all things move towards acceptance. In time, debates about filmmakers usually settle in favor of the filmmaker — not because detractors change their minds, but because the urgency of the conflict wanes, and stalemates go to the fans. It’s hard to believe that battle lines were once drawn…
Director Jake Paltrow (Young Ones, The Good Night) met Brian De Palma at a party. He’d had a few drinks and worked up the courage to talk to the legendary filmmaker, who turned out to be surprisingly open and kind. The next day, Paltrow got an email from the friend…
AMC’s Preacher is a surprisingly sedate creation. It moves at such a glacial pace that you have to wonder if the brain trust behind this adaptation of Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s gonzo ‘90s Vertigo comic — Seth Rogen, Sam Catlin and Evan Goldberg — forgot it only has 10…
At last, a Hollywood reimagining with a point. David Yates’ two-fisted pulp-studies spree The Legend of Tarzan doesn’t just update Edgar Rice Burroughs’ white-boy jungle-bro for our age of heightened sensitivities and bit rates. It interrogates the very idea of Tarzan, signing the old sport up for the good fight…
In the opening scene of Mo Gaffney and Kathy Najimy’s durable off-Broadway hit Parallel Lives, the Supreme Being is not a white-bearded dude on a cloud. Rather, there are two Creators, they’re both women, and they have wicked senses of humor and plenty of feminist mores: For one thing, they…
An unlikely buddy comedy-drama about the friendship between a suicidal castaway played by Paul Dano and a flatulent corpse played by Daniel Radcliffe, Swiss Army Man doesn’t seem like the kind of movie you’d watch with your mother. So what was it like to be the mothers of the film’s…
Very few advance screenings preceded Independence Day: Resurgence’s arrival in theaters on the evening of June 23. That’s eight days ahead of the July 4th weekend that in simpler times — like 1996, when Independence Day was the year’s biggest hit — was traditionally reserved for the biggest, ka-blammiest movie of the…
Deadpool, Sailor Moon, and the Joker walk into a bar. You know there’s a joke in there, but you can’t find it. You’ve been mesmerized by the sight of Captain America with a mouthful of popcorn and a bulging beer belly. You’re pulled from your reverie when a 23-year-old Ash…
Octave Mirbeau’s The Diary of a Chambermaid, a 1900 novel about the depravities in all social strata written from the point of view of a servant named Célestine, has famously been adapted twice before, by two of cinema’s immortals. Benoît Jacquot’s uneven take on the material won’t challenge the stature…
People made a stink about the walkouts during the Sundance premiere of music-video-and-advertising geniuses the Daniels’ first feature film, Swiss Army Man. It stars Daniel Radcliffe (Manny) as a farting, rotting corpse with superpowers and Paul Dano (Hank) as a sad-sack suicidal stalker trying to get home through a forest…
Can Steven Spielberg do comedy? That seems like a dumb question, since nobody has done more to bring wit to the modern blockbuster; Raiders of the Lost Ark and Jaws boast as many laugh-out-loud moments as they do thrills. But those gags are often incidental, of the tension-breaking kind. When…
Stanley Kubrick once sent his friend John le Carré a letter about why he couldn’t adapt one of the author’s books. “Essentially,” he wrote, “how do you tell a story it took the author 165,000 (my guess) good and necessary words to tell, with 12,000 words (about the number of…
Hannah Arendt is unlikely to be a social media star. Newly relevant 40 years after her death, the German-born philosopher’s work is distinctly ill-suited to contemporary tools of relevance. Twitter’s context of no context values aphorism, parody and potted wisdom — branded content available in bulk. The author of The…
According to IMDb, Jaume Collet-Serra’s over-before-you-know-it The Shallows runs for one hour and 27 minutes — a number that produces a reaction something like when an NBA roster lists a short-looking player at five-foot-nine and you marvel, Really? Nate Robinson is that tall? The shark thriller has only three or…
Finally, a holiday celebration that every generation can agree is lit. It’s officially Summer, which means Fourth of July is right around the corner, so it’s time to break out your best BBQ recipes, grab a new bathing suit, and start putting some thought into how you will celebrate Independence…
