Movies & TV

As a director and screenwriter, Ryan Coogler has built a career as an unparalleled interpreter of other people’s intellectual property. With Creed, he became the first person who isn’t Sylvester Stallone to write a film in the Rocky franchise. With Black Panther, he nailed the near-impossible assignment of adapting a thinly-drawn Marvel character conceit—created by […]

All war movies are now anti-war movies—that is, if an anti-war movie is measured by the severity of its misery. This is an unceasing human imperative in art: to showcase our species’ darkest atrocities through a transcendent exploration of the suffering those atrocities inflict, but to go even more HAM about it than the last […]

Alain Guiraduie’s latest film Misericordia is a mystery, a comedy, a drama, or some combination of the above tags. But that label still don’t quite hit the mark. That’s the sneaky power of this French director’s work to date. Even his most celebrated previous film, the thrilling masterpiece Stranger by the Lake, avoided easy categorization […]

Direct Action has no characters. Someone may appear in one scene, and then, several sequences later, enter the frame again. Maybe. Direct Action never names anyone; it only shows you their hands—picking through a mud-heavy bucket, playing piano, or making a huge mass of dough, the camera locked on the pile of flour and pool […]

Who is this film for? I wondered, as a monstrous computer-generated unicorn yanked out likewise generated entrails with its pointy horn and tossed them into the air. Watching Death of a Unicorn felt like living the consequences of a late-night, stoned riff on that 2010 unicorn meat meme. The gist is: ”What if unicorns make […]

In this current boom time for horror films, let us once again praise the work of the city’s movie theaters that offer repertory showings—for providing access to both classic films of the form (education for recent converts to the genre, like myself) and some gristle for the longtime fans to gnaw on. The calendars for Hollywood […]

It is extremely on-brand that, in adapting the sci-fi novel Mickey 7, director Bong Joon-ho decided to kill the protagonist 10 more times. If you’ve seen Bong’s movies before, you could probably see this coming. In this film, as in his other sci-fi films like Snowpiercer and Okja, villains aren’t just evil, they’re mustache-twirling, tied-someone-to-the-train-tracks […]

Depending on how one wants to categorize ground chuck, at least two people in The Monkey are ground into it. The first is the victim of a horse stampede, and the other becomes a meaty mess via lawnmower.  We learn about the former when a sleeping bag is casually overturned, slopping out smushed man-oatmeal. The […]

With an almost mathematical precision to its pulpiness, The Prosecutor, the latest action-thriller from Hong Kong superstar Donnie Yen, doles out a brutal fight scene every 25 to 30 minutes. Across two brisk hours, violence shifts proportionately between bouts of athletic knuckling, street brawls, shoot-outs, car chases, foot chases, impalings, and pummelings—all spaced out evenly, each […]

Indie documentary Dig! didn’t need to be improved upon, but its director Ondi Timoner has done just that.

Universal Horror remake Wolf Man drops most werewolf lore for a self-contained story about bad dads.