Screen
All robots hate you
As a milky-white gross-beast skitters its way around a wheat field, getting murder-death all over gun-toting space colonists, the only question becomes whether Alien:...
Bland, flavorless cheese
Sand dunes at sunset, summer lovin’ (had me a blast!), a third-act medical crisis and a clutch of letters designed to be read aloud in voice-over: Another month, another adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks romance. This month’s is called The Last Song, starring Miley ...
Liveaction Oscar shorts a big deal
Start small. That’s the guiding dictum for everything from biological evolution to filmmaking. The live-action shorts that mark the start of most directors’ careers rarely see the light of day outside of specialized festivals; that is, except for the lucky bunch ...
Home Viewing: Barbara Bridges and Jill S. Tietjen on ‘Hollywood: Her...
If there’s a specific resistance to women making movies, I just choose to ignore that as an obstacle for two reasons: I can’t change...
The last masterpiece
On April 23, 1917, Buster Keaton made his theatrical debut in Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle’s The Butcher Boy. Three years later, Keaton would strike out...
Get Fassbent
So the whole time, Michael Fassbender wears this giant, papier-mache-style head and mumble-sings gibberish lyrics about things like snags in the carpet while other people play instruments they created out of things like toothbrushes. Welcome to Frank, a movie that is...
Myopic biopic
Biopics are lies. Oh, don’t get me wrong, all storytelling is fundamentally fibbing. But it seems somehow more disingenuous to airbrush actual human histories, to select which warts to ignore and which redemptive moments to exaggerate. Documentaries exist for a ...
Speedy and irritable
The most important thing to know before attempting to endure the lumbering bore that is Need for Speed is this: every single character in the film is unspeakably dumb. Presumably set in a world where humans never mentally evolved from an animal state, the movie ...











