Screen
‘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...
‘Hangover’ hangover
For some movies, seeming funny is enough. The Hangover Part II only has to show up to succeed. At once pushy and lazy, the sequel follows the 2009 smash, which has become the most lucrative R-rated comedy in history. Isn’t that depressing? I find that depressing...
Yes, they mean you
Thrill-seekers live for the rush that comes from defying death; adrenaline is the body’s chemical “thank you” for keeping it alive. Somehow, that’s the sensation I got watching Dear White People, writer/ director Justin Simien’s declaration that he didn’t come to ...
Savage deception, revealed
Amir Bar- Lev’s previous documentary, My Kid Could Paint That, questioned the authorship of a little girl’s unusually sophisticated and lucrative canvases, and the role her father may have played in their creation. It was a detective story as well as a highly ...
Original sin
Every April, tiny flowers spread like confetti across the blackjack hills of Oklahoma. This is Osage Territory — land carved out and granted to...
The long of it
About a decade ago, a bunch of rich assholes collapsed the world’s economy because they were dumb, evil and greedy. They didn’t go to...
Robert Pattinson plays Jacob
Like The Notebook, but with an elephant, the unexpectedly good film version of Water for Elephants elevates pure corn to a completely satisfying realm of romantic melodrama. This adaptation of the Sara Gruen bestseller, set in a storybook edition of Depression-era ...
All I need to get by
There weren’t any crowds in Park City, Utah, and the big studios may have stayed away, but the 2021 Sundance Film Festival proved that...
Restless leg syndrome
Feel free to call director Steven Soderbergh’s latest film (and potentially last, if you believe his retirement threats) a wacky mallard because it is one odd duck. If a Hitchcock movie took a Dateline NBC segment behind the art house theater and got it pregnant, ...
From a second-rate Bette Davis to a first-rate auteur
They say the future of film is female. It is. But so is the past. Maybe
that’s not evident upon first glance — certainly not...
