Screen
These pictures of you
Hank has given up. Marooned on a deserted island in the Pacific, he has run out of food, water and reasons to live. All...
The space between
Ad Astra, the latest from filmmaker par excellence James Gray, opens with a shot of the cosmos, vast and terrifying. As the camera pans...
Home viewing: Women Make Film
Running 14 hours and featuring the work of 183 directors, 700 clips and seven narrators, Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema...
‘Melvin Van Peebles: Essential Films’ is an essential set
He was a filmmaker, an actor, a novelist, a playwright, and a revolutionary. He made one of the most profitable and overlooked independent films...
Slop disguised as fun
In its own sweetly bombastic way, the 2008 remake of Journey to the Center of the Earth did the job, the job being a 21st-century 3-D bash starring Brendan Fraser — an actor who gives his all to the green screen, every time — and loosely based on the 19th-century ...
Zac Efron cries a lot
The Motion Picture Association of America has given Charlie St. Cloud a PG-13 rating for, among other things, “an intense accident scene,” which is the best way to describe the film itself. With some supernatural melodramas, you may buy what’s on the page, as with...
A portrait of the writers as young men
David Foster Wallace is an ordinary guy. He reads obsessively, eats junk food en masse, is addicted to watching TV, wonders what it is like when Alanis Morissette eats a bologna sandwich and lives his life with a nagging feeling of emptiness. Wallace self-diagnoses ...
When I paint my masterpiece
Consider the bus driver. Do you notice them as you board the Skip? Do you wonder what they see as the Dash rumbles down...
Long Day’s Journey Into Night
When Avatar shattered box-office records in 2009, many
attributed the movie’s success to 3D’s profitability. And not just because
viewers were intrigued, but because tickets cost...
Sucky socialists
Paul Rudd stands in front of a bathroom vanity and riffs a string of vulgar, not-very-funny euphemisms for the intercourse he plans to have with Malin Akerman’s character in an outtake that’s part of the closing credits of Wanderlust. It’s a part of the process with ...

















