Nick Schager

The reason eyewitness testimony requires corroboration in a criminal trial is that memory—an internal account that can’t be verified by anyone else, and which may consciously or unconsciously change over time thanks to a variety of factors—is inherently unreliable. Yet in 1990, a jury decided that George Franklin was guilty of the 1969 murder of Susan Nason, the best friend of his 8-year-old daughter Eileen, based solely on the adult Eileen’s claim that, while staring into the eyes of her own child, she was suddenly beset by a heretofore-forgotten vision of her father fatally striking Susan with a large stone. Eileen […]

The Velvet Underground, Todd Haynes’ non-fiction portrait of the avant-garde rock titans, isn’t as overtly unconventional as I’m Not There, his 2007 take on Bob Dylan’s life that featured numerous actors playing fictionalized variations on the singer-songwriter. Nonetheless, there’s bracing uniqueness to the director’s latest, which employs a striking formal style to recount the origins, glory days, and implosion of one of the 20th century’s most ahead-of-their-time musical acts, whose grungy beat-poetry lyrics, severe sonic experimentation, and non-conformist attitude paved the way for innumerable subsequent bands (and helped inspire Haynes’ own Velvet Goldmine). Wielding familiar elements in thrillingly novel ways, Haynes […]

Nothing can truly kill James Bond, but the COVID-19 pandemic certainly tried, delaying the release of No Time to Die—the MI6 agent’s 25th official feature-film outing—by a year and a half. In an unexpected twist, Bond’s latest boasts a trace of timely resonance, courtesy of a story that hinges on a nefarious plot to infect the world with a lethal contagion. What’s most surprising about Daniel Craig’s fifth and final go-round as 007, however, is its general lack of urgency or excitement. A workmanlike swan song that never approaches the highs of Casino Royale or Skyfall, it sends the star out […]

William Shakespeare’s Macbeth has been the source material for two big-screen masterpieces—Orson Welles’ 1948 Macbeth and Akira Kurosawa’s 1957 Throne of Blood—and to that eminent company one may now add Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, which takes as its inspiration not only Welles’ predecessor but the works of Carl Theodor Dreyer, Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau and Ingmar Bergman (to name just a few). The first feature produced by the director without his sibling and long-time partner Ethan, Coen’s film (premiering Sept. 24 as the Opening Night selection of the New York Film Festival before theaters and Apple TV+) is a […]

There’s no real “curse” in Curse of the Chippendales, but there is plenty of titillating stripping and sensationalistic crime in Discovery+’s four-part docuseries, premiering Sept. 24. An amusing look back at the 1980s phenomenon that took America—and, in particular, women’s libidos—by storm, it’s a saga of sex, greed, money, murder and G-strings, all of it told with a welcome measure of good humor. Part underworld thriller, part nostalgic celebration of an iconic fad, writer/director Jesse Vile’s investigation echoes its subject by providing an entertainingly tawdry mix of thrills and laughs, as well as some familiar commentary on the way in which […]

Any current review of Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space is inherently incomplete, since the five-part Netflix docuseries is aiming to debut in real time alongside the event it’s depicting: the Sept. 15 launch of SpaceX’s Inspiration4, which will be the first all-civilian flight to orbit the Earth—a feat it’ll accomplish three times during its three-day journey, at speeds of 1,750 mph and at a height greater than that of the International Space Station. Consequently, the only episodes available to press at the moment are its first two prologue installments (premiering Sept. 6); chapters three and four will hit the streaming service […]

There are many challengers to the sports-movie throne but few real contenders, and over the past decade, none have matched the emotional and physical ferocity of Warrior, Gavin O’Connor’s 2011 classic about two brothers—bruising amateur-wrestling superstar and Iraq War vet Tommy (Tom Hardy) and high school physics teacher and former UFC punching bag Brendan (Joel Edgerton)—who wind up both competing in a winner-take-all MMA tournament for a $5 million purse. Released to strong reviews but only so-so box office receipts, O’Connor’s drama largely came and went without making much of a cultural dent, this despite the fact that as Tommy and […]

What We Do in the Shadows is a love story—the catch being that it’s between ancient vampires and a human minion who also happens to be a vampire slayer. It’s also set in Staten Island. And shot like a reality-TV series. And obsessed with supernatural creatures, over-the-top gore, and dirty sex. All of which makes it totally and hilariously absurd, and the best half-hour comedy on television. Returning for its third season on Sept. 2, FX’s What We Do in the Shadows is a spin-off of Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement’s 2014 feature film of the same name. At this point, […]

Marvel Studios Like Black Panther, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is a representational pioneer—in this case, it’s the first Marvel Cinematic Universe entry (and the rare slam-bang studio extravaganza) to feature an Asian lead. Unfortunately, that’s not the only thing it has in common with Ryan Coogler’s 2018 superhero effort. A stew of dead parents, childhood trauma, lush and secret magical worlds, ancient armies, quasi-sympathetic villains, and an upright hero who must embrace his noble birthright over the course of an adventure in which he’s surrounded by formidable female warriors, Destin Daniel Cretton’s film follows its predecessor’s template […]

Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed sounds like the title of a true-crime parody, promising a dark and gritty take on the life of one of America’s cheeriest—and most beloved—artistic figures. Nonetheless, there’s nothing jokey about Joshua Rofé’s Netflix documentary (Aug. 25), which serves as both a loving portrait of the landscape painter who inspired millions to pick up a brush, and a disheartening exposé of the various ways in which his work, and legacy, were exploited by the selfish partners closest to him. Rofé’s film is, first and foremost, a celebration of a caring, ambitious man who rose from […]

Over the last six years, acclaimed filmmaker Neill Blomkamp (District 9, Elysium) has been attached to sequels to Aliens and RoboCop, two of modern science-fiction’s most beloved series. Yet despite considerable online interest for both projects—which would have ignored later installments and picked up immediately after 1986’s Aliens and 1987’s RoboCop, respectively—neither appears likely to get off the ground in the foreseeable future, courtesy of clashing visions and studio priorities. Nonetheless, on the eve of the debut of his new thriller Demonic, the Academy Award-nominated South African writer/director remains upbeat about the possibility of again working in established franchises, provided the […]

Cults are terrible, but few have been quite as monstrous as the Children of God, whose founder David Berg not only espoused the usual drivel about an impending apocalypse and his own status as God’s prophet, but also preached a doctrine of pedophilic sex abuse. In the audio recordings and cartoon-decorated literature (known as “Mo Letters”) that he sent to his communes around the world, Berg promoted the belief that sex was love, that love was God, and thus that children should have carnal relations with each other, and with adults. The result was an environment of horrific rape and exploitation […]

Killers don’t like to get caught, but once in custody, they sure do like to talk, as evidenced by a raft of true-crime efforts—Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, Confronting a Serial Killer, The Confession Killer, The Sons of Sam: A Descent Into Darkness and Elize Matsunaga: Once Upon a Crime, among others—centered around taped conversations with notorious fiends. To that list one can now add Memories of a Murderer: The Nilsen Tapes, a non-fiction film whose primary draw is a raft of personal recordings made by Dennis Nilsen, the Scottish madman who terrorized London during the 1980s, and […]

I wish I could say that UFO definitively proves that aliens are among us, but at least Showtime’s new four-part docuseries (produced by J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot) does contend that it’s a possibility, given that we now have solid evidence of unidentified flying objects’ existence. Using as its foundation The New York Times’ 2017 article, “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program,” this intriguing investigation into flying saucers and the possible extraterrestrials manning their controls is an attempt at legitimizing a field of study that’s long been ridiculed by the public at large, as well as mythologized by […]

In April 1991, a manuscript titled Point of Origin made the literary-agency rounds. It told the story of a serial arsonist who derives great psychological and sexual satisfaction from igniting various types of conflagrations. The book, according to an accompanying letter penned by its author, was “a fact-based work that follows the pattern of an actual arsonist who has been setting serial fires in California over the past eight years. He has not been identified or apprehended. He probably will not be in the near future.” The novel did not find a taker. Yet shortly thereafter, it did attract national attention […]

“If you’re going to build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?” Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) states about his era-hopping DeLorean in Back to the Future, thus cementing that vehicle’s place in the American pop-culture imagination. It was certainly easy to see why director Robert Zemeckis chose the car for Doc and Marty’s sci-fi ride—with two gull-wing doors that suggested it might be able to fly, and a body made out of stainless steel, the DeLorean looked like something out of the 21st century. The irony, however, was that by the time that 1985 movie […]

Documentaries can be informative, enlightening, enraging, intriguing, and inspiring—but they are rarely edge-of-your-seat suspenseful. Not so with Sabaya. Detailing the work of a few male and female activists who rescue enslaved Yazidi women from the clutches of ISIS in war-torn Syria, writer/director/editor/cinematographer Hogir Hirori’s film boasts a proximity to its action that’s nail-bitingly extreme. From early imagery shot from the POV of a woman wearing a niqab (i.e. an all-encompassing veil) as she walks through a camp’s dusty marketplace streets, her identity as an interloper concealed only by the black garment covering her from head to toe, it’s an anxiety-inducing portrait […]

Years after the Catholic Church was found to have systematically harbored and protected child-sex abusers while punishing victims for seeking justice for their horrific ordeals, a new feature-length Vice TV documentary sets its sights on the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Aaron Kaufman’s film Crusaders—released as part of Vice TV’s “Vice Versa” nonfiction series—eviscerates the Jehovah’s Witness faith in which he was raised, giving a public platform for former members to speak out about the scourge of pedophilia within the church, and about the elders who are committed to keeping it a secret. Premiering on Vice TV on July 28, Crusaders builds upon Douglas […]

As a kid, there was He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, and there was everything else. Thus, it’s with some admitted nostalgia that I report that the new Masters of the Universe: Revelation is a success, at least insofar as it authentically resurrects the franchise’s favorite characters while simultaneously updating them—and their adventures—for the 21st century. Spearheaded by Kevin Smith, Netflix’s animated saga feels like an organic continuation of the original syndicated TV series that ran for two seasons from 1983-1985 (in the process, it ignores the 1987 film and later 2002 TV show). Moreover, it manages the not-inconsiderable feat […]

Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst was the embodiment of late-’90s aggro dudebro ugliness, and his band’s riot-instigating performance at Woodstock ’99—the second revitalization of the festival brand by co-founder Michael Lang and producer John Scher, following Woodstock ’94—took the brunt of the blame for the event’s devolution into violent, misogynistic bedlam. The new documentary series Woodstock ’99: Peace, Love, and Rage doesn’t let Durst and his Limp Bizkit cohorts off the hook, and Scher in particular eventually points the finger squarely at the red-capped frontman for most of what transpired over three July days in Rome, New York. Yet director Garret Price’s […]

With The Boys in Red Hats (in theaters and on VOD July 16), director Jonathan Schroder mounts a highly personal investigation into the January 2019 Lincoln Memorial standoff between Kentucky’s Covington Catholic High School students and Native American activist Nathan Phillips. That incident was made famous by Nick Sandmann’s smirk seen around the world, which immediately turned the teenager into a viral villain, and Schroder, an alumnus of Covington, is upfront about the fact that his documentary aims to clear his alma mater’s (and Sandmann’s) good name. Yet to the surprise of himself, and to us, what he delivers is something […]

Billy Tipton was what someone in No Ordinary Man respectfully refers to a “regional jazz musician.” In the mid-1930s, he fronted a band that performed on radio stations and at Elks Lodges, Air Force bases and in nightclubs, first in his native Oklahoma City and then throughout various parts of the country. He was a successful working artist, and with The Billy Tipton Trio, he recorded two jazz-standard albums and, shortly thereafter, was offered a spot playing in Reno, Nevada, as the opener for Liberace. Rather than continuing to ascend the showbiz ladder, however, Tipton retreated from the spotlight, becoming a […]

Heist barely qualifies as a docuseries, given that approximately 95 percent of its action is staged dramatic recreations of events that are narrated by a few principal figures—one of whom, it’s ultimately revealed, is actually an actor reciting lines from a pre-recorded interview. The proceedings’ generally artificial nature, which extends to commentary that often sounds as if it’s been scripted, is a nagging problem for Netflix’s latest true-crime effort. In the end, however, even more problematic is the simple fact that its stories aren’t nearly as engaging, and its culprits aren’t nearly as sympathetic, as the show finds them. Premiering on […]

It only took until the second sketch of I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson’s sophomore season for me to start crying with laughter. The catalyst in question was another of creator Robinson’s absurdist fake commercials, this one a plea for the Spectrum cable company to not drop Corncob TV, home to Robinson’s reality show Coffin Flop. “They’re saying Coffin Flop’s not a show—it’s just hours and hours of footage of real people falling out of coffins at funerals,” Robinson fumes while Coffin Flop clips verify this assessment. In response to the supposed claim that he has no right to […]

Slasher films were always best when they were disreputable, so it’s far from disrespectful to resurrect them in kitschy modern form. Netflix’s Fear Street trilogy—a three-movie summer event, with each installment premiering on a successive Friday, that’s based on R.L. Stine’s book series—certainly exudes love for its trashy, bloody genre. The first of those entries, Part One: 1994, is a giddy throwback to the days of Scream, and as if to make that point even more self-consciously clear, director Leigh Janiak’s feature begins with a young woman named Heather (Maya Hawke) being stalked late at night by a fiend in a […]

Few franchises have squandered a fertile premise quite as thoroughly as The Purge, which over four installments—The Purge, The Purge Anarchy, The Purge: Election Year, and The First Purge, not to mention the short-lived TV series—has increasingly veered away from nightmarish horror and toward leaden, action-oriented political preaching. The Forever Purge, the fifth chapter in the unkillable series (in theaters July 2), doesn’t, in most respects, right that wayward course, telling a pointed immigration-fixated story that once again takes itself far too seriously. Nonetheless, there are flashes of gonzo inspiration in this hyper-violent saga, most of them having to do with […]

Ghislaine Maxwell has a name that many can’t pronounce and a backstory that’s shrouded in mystery. Epstein’s Shadow: Ghislaine Maxwell seeks to rectify the latter by investigating the life of Jeffrey Epstein’s notorious girlfriend and co-conspirator, who currently resides in a Brooklyn jail awaiting trial for a variety of sex-trafficking charges that were levied against her by the U.S. federal government in 2020. Informative and comprehensive, it paints a portrait of a woman who was groomed at an early age for her eventual role as a madame for her pedophilic partner—a cretin for whom she herself groomed countless underage girls for […]

James Joseph “Whitey” Bulger is arguably the most notorious gangster to ever come out of Boston, and his life of crime became headline news when, in December 1994, he went on the run and landed himself on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. That tale, as well as his eventual capture in Santa Monica in June 2011 at the age of 81, inspired the Johnny Depp-headlined Black Mass as well as Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning The Departed. Brendan J. Byrne’s new Discovery+ documentary, however, is less about Whitey’s reign of terror than it is about his sibling William Bulger, who, in a […]

When treasure-hunting art collectors Alexander Parish and Robert Simon purchased a Salvator Mundi painting from a New Orleans auction house in 2005, they had no idea they were making the veritable find of the century: an apparent work by none other than Leonardo da Vinci. Considering that such a discovery hadn’t happened in almost 100 years, they knew they’d hit the jackpot—provided, of course, they could verify its authenticity. That turned out to be a controversial quest, and it forms the foundation of The Lost Leonardo, a documentary that not only asks whether this noteworthy painting is real, but whether, given […]

At the outset of Accepted, Michael Landry seems like a hero. Determined to provide young (mostly Black) students in rural Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, with the education and guidance—and thus college opportunities—that he couldn’t successfully give to his own kids, he and wife Tracey founded, in 2005, the TM Landry Prep School. An unconventional house of learning, it was a place where, through long and rigorous days and nights of study often delivered with a healthy dose of tough love and encouraging preaching, Landry sought to mold young minds, instilling in them the values of hard work, ambition, and sacrifice that would […]

Brian Wilson has lived a renowned life full of joy and heartache, but on Monday night at a virtual press conference to celebrate the upcoming June 15 Tribeca Film Festival premiere of Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road, Brent Wilson’s documentary about the Beach Boys founder’s personal and professional ups and downs, the 78-year-old singer, songwriter and producer was in a cheerful—if less than wholly talkative—mood. Asked over Zoom why he agreed to participate in Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road, Wilson was succinct: “I don’t know, I just made up my mind.” Nonetheless, sitting alongside director Wilson (no relation), he admitted that […]

Proof that fiction need not be explicit to be sexy, Little Birds is just about the most eroticized thing to hit American TV in years. Exuding sweaty desire in every one of its Vaseline-smeary, boldly colorful, canted-angle compositions, Sophia Al-Maria’s Starz series (premiering June 6, following its 2020 British debut) never met a scenario or an actor it didn’t want to sexualize, turning everything and everyone in this six-part affair into an object of intense lust and longing. It’s hard to imagine the show being more hungry for the taste and feel of human flesh, and the euphoric release that comes […]

Nazis are the absolute worst, and for yet another reminder of that age-old fact, there’s Nail Bomber: Manhunt, Netflix’s non-fiction revisitation of the 1999 London bombings that left three people dead and nearly 150 injured. Carried out by a neo-Nazi named David Copeland whose motivation was “to cause a racial war in this country,” the three attacks against England’s Black and gay communities terrorized the country and, for a time, baffled police. While director Daniel Vernon’s documentary (premiering May 26) doesn’t dig deeply enough into its tale—preferring instead to reside on the suspenseful surface throughout—it serves as a chilling warning that […]

With WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Marvel has now expanded its cinematic universe to Disney+. That more or less spells doom for any of its other small-screen efforts that weren’t integrated into its larger ongoing superhero narrative—be it ABC’s Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D and Agent Carter, or Netflix’s Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and Luke Cage—and suggests that going forward, just about everything it produces will operate under one interconnected, all-enveloping Marvel umbrella. Thus, Marvel’s M.O.D.O.K., a stop-motion animated series premiering May 21 on Hulu, is a stand-alone venture that feels behind the eight-ball even before its premiere—a situation that’s […]

The Satanic Panic of the ’80s and early ’90s was fueled by wild stories about ritualistic killings, human and animal sacrifices, and pledges of allegiance to dark demonic lords. Most of those claims turned out to be tall tales, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t result in criminal justice system convictions. One such example involved the nightmare that befell Fall River, Massachusetts, (the birthplace of Lizzie Borden) in1979-1980, when three young prostitutes were found bound, bludgeoned to death, and, in one instance, horribly mutilated. Though the victims were all killed in a strikingly similar manner, police didn’t investigate them as the […]

Writer/director Timur Bekmambetov’s breakthrough Russian fantasy epics Night Watch and Day Watch were so heavily indebted to Hollywood productions that it made sense when he subsequently gravitated to America for Wanted and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Yet having made his name with conventional blockbuster productions, Bekmambetov has in the past few years carved out a more unique path for himself, producing works—including Unfriended and its sequel Unfriended: Dark Web, as well as the John Cho-led Searching—that play out entirely on a computer screen. Known as Screen Life, it’s a format that seeks to tell stories about our 21st-century device-filtered reality by […]

In I, Sniper, Lee Boyd Malvo speaks at length about the 2002 reign of terror he and partner John Allen Muhammad carried out in the Washington, D.C., area, resulting in ten deaths. Yet despite using audio clips from his phone calls as narration, Vice’s eight-part docuseries (premiering May 10) is most notable for putting its prime emphasis on the pair’s innocent victims, and the countless friends, family members and loved ones left to cope with unthinkable tragedy. To its admirable credit, it’s a true-crime affair that seeks to understand its “monsters” while simultaneously recognizing—and highlighting—the fact that such comprehension doesn’t necessitate […]

Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin may have imagined the Soviet ruler’s demise in satiric terms, but its ridiculousness has nothing on the breathtaking absurdity and horror of State Funeral. The final piece of a loose trilogy that also includes The Trial (2018) and The Event (2018), Sergei Loznitsa’s stellar documentary (out now) is another found-footage feature culled from preexisting material—in this case, 40 hours of restored black-and-white and color footage, shot by over 200 cameramen, of the monumental pomp and circumstance surrounding Stalin’s funeral in March of 1953. Capturing throngs of mourning citizens and Communist Party apparatchiks as they stoically […]

Dramatic recreations are a stain on most non-fiction efforts, but not so with Dark Side of the Ring. Vice’s docuseries about professional wrestling’s wildest, scariest and saddest stories boasts perhaps the finest reenactments in the genre, thanks to a smoky, shadowy aesthetic that leaves everything feeling cartoonishly melodramatic—fitting, for the subject matter—and features actors (only seen in faceless silhouette) whose physical resemblance to wrestling’s larger-than-life brawlers is nothing short of uncanny. Staying true to the look and spirit of their chosen subject, they’re a prime example of a generally superfluous and cheesy device done right. That continues with Dark Side of […]

David Berkowitz, aka the Son of Sam, killed six New Yorkers and wounded seven more—all with his trademark .44 caliber revolver—before being caught on Aug. 10, 1977. A loner who struck fear into the heart of the Big Apple with crimes that were all the more chilling for being so random, Berkowitz was, and remains, one of America’s most notorious serial killers, a fiend who targeted everyday citizens because, he claimed, a 6,000-year-old demon told him to via his neighbor’s dog. His crime spree was national news, and his capture calmed the metropolis he had paralyzed with terror. Yet the question […]

Arriving three-plus years after its last installment, The Girlfriend Experience’s third season retains the series’ focus on sex work as well as its decidedly un-sexy atmosphere. As before, beautiful, wealthy, and influential figures navigate icy modern locales and transactional relationships with steely detachment, their erotic aims intertwined with their hunger for power and control. Yet in most other respects, this latest go-round for the Starz show (premiering May 2)—loosely inspired by Steven Soderbergh’s 2009 film of the same name—charts a unique course, fixating on the role that technology plays in amorous connections, and downplaying, as much as possible, the actual carnal […]

“It’s not easy being human” says a businessman in Roy Andersson’s 2000 masterwork Songs from the Second Floor, succinctly encapsulating the focus of the now 77-year-old Swedish director’s oeuvre. In that triumph as well as its two companions, 2007’s You, the Living and 2014’s A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, Andersson wields droll humor and aching pathos to investigate the crux of our myriad emotional dilemmas, his films comprised of vignettes that marry the wit of Gary Larson’s The Far Side, the spiritual and existential despair of Ingmar Bergman, and the fantastical joy and tragedy of Federico Fellini. […]

Yasuke concerns Japan’s first Black samurai, although a history lesson is not what’s provided by this six-part Netflix anime series. Enlivened by a cross-cultural spirit that blends East and West—and the classical and the modern—to create something refreshingly unique, showrunner and director LeSean Thomas’ animated venture (premiering April 29) uses its real-life origins as a launching pad for a fantastical tale of feudal war in which swordsmen and archers do battle alongside giant mechas, sentient robots, and magic-wielding warriors. Think of it as a hybrid of Yojimbo, Mobile Suit Gundam and Lone Wolf and Cub, much of it coated in arterial-spray […]

Nature can be neither opposed nor fled in In the Earth, which—following last year’s misbegotten Rebecca, that never fit his gonzo sensibilities—returns writer/director Ben Wheatley to the hallucinatory strobe-lit horror insanity of his 2014 gem A Field in England. A stripped-down genre affair shot during quarantine and infused with deeply rooted pandemic fears, it’s a phantasmagoric folky freak-out that, like a pestilence, gets under one’s skin, where it festers and infects with unnerving potency. Perched on the razor-thin boundary between lucidity and madness, it gnaws at the nerves and bludgeons the senses until submission—to humanity’s helplessness in the face of the […]

Gangs of London’s premiere episode boasts a barroom brawl of jaw-dropping brutality, as low-level hood Elliot Finch (His House’s Sope Dirisu) dispatches a group of Albanian henchman by snapping their limbs, flipping them onto their necks, and stabbing and slashing them with a throwing dart. It’s a ferocious showstopper that ably sets the tone for this gritty and often gruesome U.K. gangster series, which—following its April 2020 UK debut—premieres April 4 on AMC. Moreover, it underscores that the proceedings (very loosely inspired by a 2006 video game) are the handiwork of Gareth Evans, the Welsh-born director whose 2011 action film The […]

With Godzilla vs. Kong, Warner Bros’ monster-verse goes whole hog into Saturday morning cartoon territory—and proves all the better for it. Pitting the protagonists of Kong: Skull Island and Godzilla: King of the Monsters against one another, as well as marrying the finest aspects of those prior two franchise installments, Adam Wingard’s titan throwdown is a best-of-both-worlds affair: grand but also lighthearted, cognizant of its absurdity but not tongue-in-cheek, violent but also goofy. It’s akin to the sort of childish nonsense that kids might act out with action figures, brought to thunderous CGI-ified life by a host of digital artists who […]

No serial killer has ever had a moniker as underwhelming as the Doodler, which sounds like the name of a clownish Captain Underpants sidekick or a goofy Homer Simpson alter-ego. Nonetheless, the Doodler was no cartoon or laughing matter, killing at least five men—and perhaps as many as 16—in San Francisco between January 1974 and September 1975. Thanks to the particular time and place in which he operated, the Doodler escaped local and national front-page headlines, and to this day he remains at large. As a result, San Francisco Chronicle reporter Kevin Fagan’s new podcast The Doodler is not only a […]

We’ve now passed the one-year anniversary of the start of America’s COVID-19 nightmare, and while the vaccine rollout continues to gain steam—suggesting that the summer and beyond will be a stark improvement over what we’ve all just gone through—things have yet to return to anything resembling normal. Thus, in this present environment of continuing lockdowns and virus-prevention protocols, it’s difficult to understand the purpose of The Day Sports Stood Still, which looks back at the tumultuous early months of the pandemic for the NBA and, by extension, sports leagues nationwide. A slight, somber recap that has nothing to say about the […]

In April 1964, Dora and Chester Fronczak suffered the unthinkable. Having already lost their first child, the Chicago husband and wife were ecstatic over the arrival of their healthy, smiling son Paul. No sooner had this infant come into the world, however, than he was snatched away, abducted from Michael Reese Hospital on the day of his birth by an anonymous woman posing as a nurse. The Fronczaks were thrust into agonized turmoil, and so too was the city’s police department, since officers hadn’t been called to the hospital until an hour after Paul’s disappearance, thereby giving the kidnapper ample time […]

With WandaVision, Marvel kicked off its Disney+ era with a unique conceit tailor-made for the small screen—even as it made sure to keep that show’s story of grief and loss tethered to the larger, serialized MCU narrative. Those hoping for similar risk-taking with the studio’s second TV effort, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, would be wise to temper expectations, at least initially, as the six-part series (premiering March 19) is a more straightforward return to the militarized action that defined the Captain America piece of the MCU puzzle, from which it is a direct offshoot. Yet that’s not necessarily a […]

Zack Snyder’s Justice League is a film about superhero gods, so it’s fitting that its own production story is now the stuff of modern Hollywood legend. That myth began back in May 2017, when in the midst of post-production on Justice League, Snyder—the architect of Warner Bros’ DC universe, and the director of Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice—stepped away to deal with the death of his stepdaughter, and Avengers helmer Joss Whedon was hired to complete the would-be blockbuster. The Frankensteinian final product grossed an underwhelming $658 million worldwide, and a social media campaign for the […]

“You are on your own. Nothing happens to men like us because we live from day to day,” states a Chechen immigrant to homeless Syrian kids in Istanbul in Stray. Rootless, nomadic hand-to-mouth existences are at the center of director/producer/editor/cinematographer Elizabeth Lo’s documentary, but humans are merely the peripheral players in this stunning non-fiction inquiry, which truly trains its gaze on some of the myriad canines that roam the city’s streets. A spiritual companion piece to Ceyda Torun’s 2016 Kedi (which concerned the legions of cats inhabiting this same metropolis), Lo’s film reveals the secret life of dogs. In doing so, […]

Even with the noxious Mel Gibson as its villain and a story driven by a tired Groundhog Day conceit, Boss Level (on Hulu on March 5) is a reasonably lively video game adventure about an ex-Special Forces soldier (Frank Grillo) stuck reliving the same action-packed day over and over again until he finds a way to defeat his assassin adversaries, kill Gibson, and escape his 24-hour time loop. Much of the B-movie’s success is due to Grillo’s smarty-pants macho routine, but none of the credit goes to Naomi Watts, here relegated to playing Grillo’s scientist ex, who’s responsible for developing the […]

Guillermo Del Toro’s 2013 hit Pacific Rim was a case of two entertaining things that went well together—namely, enormous Godzilla-style monsters and equally gargantuan robot animé mechas. It was a hybrid concept predicated on scale, with titanic armored warriors dubbed Jaegers doing thunderous weaponized and hand-to-hand combat with creatures known as Kaiju who’d appeared on Earth through interdimensional Pacific Ocean portals. Operated by two pilots (via a mind-meld process called “The Drift”), the Jaegers were striking humanoid machines inspired by those found in Gundam, Neon Genesis Evangelion and Macross (not to mention Robotech and Voltron), while their Kaiju adversaries resembled distant […]

There’s no culture or faith that horror cinema has left untouched, and that goes for Judaism as well, be it with 1915’s The Golem, 2009’s The Unborn or 2015’s Demon. The Vigil is another work in that tradition, mining Jewish customs for a disquieting tale about unholy things that scream, claw, and corrupt in the dead of night. Writer/director Keith Thomas’ feature debut cannily filters its suspense through the prism of personal—and inherited—Jewish trauma, and given that it concerns a lonely, tormented man going mad while trapped inside a house, it also has a quarantine creepiness that amplifies its potency. Now […]

“Football is for people who have guts,” opines Pelé at the start of directors David Tryhorn and Ben Nicholas’ non-fiction biopic Pelé, and no one had more guts than the iconic Brazilian athlete. No one had more talent either, which is what made him the most famous, and greatest, footballer in history. Completing an unofficial sports-doc trilogy from the past year—following ESPN’s The Last Dance and HBO’s Tiger—Netflix’s Pelé (out Feb. 23) revisits its subject’s unparalleled playing career through a deft assembly of archival clips, commentary from relatives, teammates, journalists and politicians, and interviews with Pelé himself. Now 80 years old, […]

Historically, American Jews have leaned more liberal than conservative, especially given the anti-Semitic white nationalists and neo-Nazis that comfortably reside on the right. So what are we to make of the fact that today, the largest block of supporters of Israel are American Republicans and, in particular, Evangelical Christians? ’Til Kingdom Come investigates that seemingly illogical alliance, unearthing a union born from a combination of extreme religious faith and strategic practicality. And while Maya Zinshtein’s non-fiction exposé doesn’t quite get to the bottom of this increasingly thorny issue, it remains an eye-opening examination of a relationship that both sides believe is […]

Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel has all the ingredients of a great true-crime mystery: a missing potential victim; an infamous locale; a dangerous urban environment; a host of suspects; an avalanche of puzzling details; a viral video that provides far more questions than answers; and a series of coincidences—or are they synchronicities?—that suggest the affair could be the byproduct of either a government plot or supernatural phenomena. Everything one could crave from a genre effort is here, although ultimately, what’s best about this four-part Netflix series (premiering Feb. 10) is its conclusion, which delivers a stinging critique of […]

Simulation theory posits that reality might not actually be real, but instead might be an illusion about which we are unaware, and from which we can possibly awaken, and it’s an idea that’s been investigated by everyone from Plato (with “The Cave”) and Descartes (with Meditations on First Philosophy) to, more recently, Philip K. Dick and The Matrix. It’s a fantasy of both escape and enslavement, liberation and manipulation, and one that taps into our own experiences moving between conscious and unconscious states, as well as losing ourselves in the fictional world of cinema. As such, it’s just about the ideal […]

In the wake of Cheer’s success, it was inevitable that Netflix would go searching for the next big inspiring sports docuseries. On the surface, We Are: The Brooklyn Saints fits that bill, charting the ups-and-downs of charismatic players and coaches involved with a Brooklyn youth football program. Unfortunately, however, surface is primarily what you get from director Rudy Valdez and executive producers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s four-part non-fiction effort, which is full of personality but woefully light on depth. We Are: The Brooklyn Saints (premiering Jan. 29) takes an intimate look at the Brooklyn Saints, a community-funded pigskin squad for […]

Donnie Darko is one of the most auspicious—and rightly heralded—directorial debuts of the new millennium, so naturally there was intense anticipation and excitement for filmmaker Richard Kelly’s follow-up, Southland Tales, an ambitious story about the End Times that concerns a complex mystery involving porn stars, marquee actors, police officers, politicians, revolutionaries, perpetual-motion energy sources, and quantum entanglement. With great hype, however, comes great potential letdown, and there was plenty of disappointment to go around when the satiric sci-fi epic premiered at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. Though a few notable voices (like The Village Voice’s J. Hoberman) rallied to its defense, […]

If you’re going to be a criminal, it’s wise to maintain a low profile. Alas, playing it safe isn’t in most lawbreakers’ DNA, and that was certainly the case with Geraldine Elizabeth “Liz” Carmichael, who in 1974 took the world by storm by taking on Detroit’s “Big Three” auto manufacturers with the Twentieth Century Motor Car Corporation and its flagship product: the Dale, a three-wheeled car that promised to deliver 70 miles per gallon, thus making it the ideal vehicle for an oil crisis-wracked America. By the time Liz launched this dodgy creation, she had already begun transitioning into a woman, […]

People who find themselves in criminal circumstances often behave unwisely, if not outright irrationally. Yet it’s rare to see individuals respond to calamity quite as stupidly as they do in The Sister, a four-part British series debuting Jan. 22 on Hulu. Written by Luther creator Neil Cross (based on his novel Burial) and directed by Niall MacCormick, The Sister wastes no time laying out its scenario. Within its first five minutes, a series of quick incidents from 2013 and the present reveal that Nathan (Years and Years’ Russell Tovey) and his acquaintance Bob (Bertie Carvel) were involved in the mysterious death […]

Cactus Jack is the sort of extreme, in-your-face portrait of domestic white nationalist terror that begins with a disclaimer from its directors, Chris and Jay Thornton: “We in no way, shape, or form endorse, encourage or share the vitriolic message of this film’s subject.” Of course, that prefacing renunciation speaks volumes about the filmmakers’ confidence (or lack thereof) in their ability to convey condemnation through their storytelling. And as this introduction suggests, their ensuing saga is a sensationalistic and one-note character study of a MAGA monster that’s designed to elicit outraged attention, but has no idea what to actually do with […]

John Lurie—saxophonist, singer, actor, director, and painter—is a true jack-of-all trades, best known for founding and leading the Lounge Lizards jazz ensemble, his performances in Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise and Down by Law (as well as his work on HBO’s Oz), and his sterling IFC/Bravo TV series Fishing with John, in which he took various famous friends (Jarmusch, Tom Waits, Matt Dillon, Willem Dafoe, and Dennis Hopper) on fishing trips around the world. Few artists have had a career as eclectic and surprising as Lurie, and thus his disappearance from the national stage over the past two decades due to […]

Considering how many involve law enforcement corruption, true crime stories suggest that without accountability cops can’t be trusted to behave properly in obtaining confessions, charging individuals, or admitting to their mistakes regarding unjust convictions. The Night Caller is both a sprawling serial-killer mystery and a saga about legal exoneration. Yet by its conclusion, it primarily proves to be another infuriating non-fiction portrait of police malfeasance and—worse still—unwillingness to own up to, and correct, their own wrongdoing. Writer/director Thomas Meadmore’s four-part Sundance Now docuseries (premiering Jan. 19) takes place in the Western Suburbs of Perth, Australia, an affluent enclave that, in the […]

Even with the best detectives on the job, catching a serial killer often hinges on a lucky break—a fact proven by the case of Richard Ramirez, the young man known as the Night Stalker who spent most of 1985 terrifying Los Angeles. Over the better part of a year, Ramirez committed a stunning number of brutal crimes, and compounding matters, he did so in a pattern-less manner that made ending his reign of terror that much more difficult. Documentarian Tiller Russell’s Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer revisits that infamously bloody period in L.A. history, and though it leans […]

Nicolas Cage can make anything cool, and that certainly applies to cursing, as confirmed by Netflix’s History of Swear Words (debuting Jan. 5), in which the Oscar-winning superstar plays host to an inquiry into our most beloved profane utterances. Cage’s participation is the highlight of executive producers Brien Meagher and Rhett Bachner’s comedic look at taboo English-language terms, lending it just the right amount of educational seriousness and tongue-in-cheek humor. Charismatically demonstrating naughty words’ vitality and power, and flashing enough bravado to show that he’s also in on the proceedings’ fundamental joke, he’s the main fucking reason to watch this goddamn […]

Many supernatural shows partake in the crazy, but few do so with the non-stop gusto of 30 Coins, whose maiden season is awash in unhinged religious insanity. The brainchild of director Álex de la Iglesia (The Day of the Beast, The Last Circus), who helms its entire eight-episode run, this Spanish saga dials itself to eleven from the outset, and then somehow manages to maintain its hysterical horror vibe through an absolute litany of bonkers twists and turns. It’s like being on an out-of-control haunted house theme park ride: you just hold on for dear life while the scares batter you […]

Pete Docter is responsible for two of Pixar’s undisputed masterpieces—Monsters, Inc. and Inside Out (along with the first five minutes of Up)—so it’s reasonable to expect lofty things from the animation director, who now doubles as the studio’s chief creative officer. The acclaimed filmmaker certainly doesn’t lack for grand ambition with his latest, Soul, a saga that plumbs existence’s big mysteries by venturing into spiritual realms both pre- and afterlife. That it doesn’t quite reach the peaks of its predecessors has much to do with the sheer strangeness of its conceit. Yet as an unconventional and daring attempt to wrestle with […]

No serial killer is more famous than Jack the Ripper, so when prostitutes began turning up dead in West Yorkshire, England, beginning in 1975—their bodies horrifically bludgeoned, mutilated, and then posed so they might be spotted by passersby—the fiend responsible for these atrocities was immediately likened to the famed Victorian slayer via the moniker “The Yorkshire Ripper.” The similarities between the two cases were striking, and as this new Ripper evaded detection, along the way seemingly taunting police through direct communiques while continuing his spree, his own legendary status grew—which, in the end, was precisely the problem, since by turning this […]

Stephen King never wrote a novel more epic—in literal or figurative terms—than 1978’s The Stand, and the continuing power of its story about the battle for humanity’s soul in a pandemic-ravaged United States has only been enhanced, unfortunately, by our own ongoing COVID-19 crisis. Arriving at an all-too-relevant moment, CBS All Access’ adaptation of King’s magnum opus (premiering Dec. 17) is anything but escapism; scenes of chaotic hospitals, catastrophically-ill patients and empty streets often feel ripped from the nightly news. Yet the greatest asset of this apocalyptic nightmare isn’t superficial timeliness but, rather, its faithful and gripping translation of King’s end-times […]

Guatemala’s civil war between the right-wing military government and leftist rebels raged for 36 years, taking the lives of approximately 200,000 civilians. When it was nearing its completion, the Human Rights Office of the Catholic Church (ODHA) started investigating atrocities committed during the brutal campaign, most of which, it determined, were perpetrated by the army. The ODHA’s work culminated with 1998’s Recovery of Historical Memory project (REMHI), a report about those crimes against humanity, which was spearheaded by a brave, crusading bishop, Juan José Gerardi. Since 1988, Gerardi had been part of the government’s National Reconciliation Commission, and he championed the […]

In Breaking Bad, Bryan Cranston embodied a seemingly honorable man who saw a criminal opportunity, took it, and then took to it. Your Honor, on the other hand, features the actor as an honorable man who’s forced by circumstance to behave in a criminal manner, and discovers that he’s quite good at it—albeit not necessarily good enough to evade capture. For Cranston, it’s a chance to play a variation on the antihero role that brought him such acclaim (including four Best Actor Emmys), and if there’s a single reason to watch this new 10-episode Showtime miniseries, it’s his galvanized performance as […]

Steven Soderbergh remains American cinema’s most exciting pioneer. From his groundbreaking indie debut sex, lies, and videotape, to his Oscar-winning Traffic and Erin Brockovich, to his blockbuster Ocean’s 11 trilogy, to his more unconventional efforts like Kafka, Bubble, The Girlfriend Experience and Unsane—not to mention his forays into TV with Cinemax’s stellar The Knick, and his inventive branching-narrative project Mosaic—the 57-year-old auteur never rests on his laurels, finding new and unexpected ways to push himself and the medium, all while maintaining his signature, electrifying flair and incisiveness. On the heels of last year’s one-two Netflix punch of High Flying Bird and […]

Many action movies are flippantly likened to video games, but few have ever earned that comparison more than Jiu Jitsu. A series of Street Fighter-esque showdowns tethered together by the type of plot that would barely pass muster in a ‘90s coin-op, Dimitri Logothetis’ film tries to overtly embrace its print-based roots—it’s an adaptation of a comic series penned by the writer/director, and features transitional interludes that resemble hand-drawn panels. Yet in both style and substance, it’s truly indebted to arcade fighting hits that prize complicated button-mashing combos over serious characterizations and drama. Oh, and it’s also an aliens-versus-martial-artists saga in […]

A former entertainment personality decides, in his later years, to go into politics. To curry favor with the Republican Party whose nomination he seeks, he cozies up to red-state extremists and evangelicals via a healthy dose of racist dog whistles. He couples that with decrying communists, liberalism, and anyone out in the streets protesting for social justice. To top it off, he then aligns himself with corporate America, running on a pro-free market, anti-regulation, tax-cutting ticket that aims to benefit the 1-percenters who make up the most powerful portion of his base—and help keep him and his family living in the […]

On March 3, 2010, Barbara Hamburg was found murdered outside her home at 44 Middle Beach Road in the quiet, affluent seaside town of Madison, Connecticut. It was a slaying that shocked the region and shattered the Hamburg family, and the ensuing investigation’s failure to come up with a single potential culprit worth charging only compounded the air of mystery surrounding the crime. In an attempt to find out who committed this atrocity, Barbara’s son Madison began a documentary inquiry into the case, and the result, HBO’s riveting four-part Murder on Middle Beach, reveals a tale rife with suspects—all of them […]

When The Mandalorian premiered last November on Disney+, it instantly rejuvenated the Star Wars franchise, which at that point was contending with continuing criticism of the reinvention-oriented The Last Jedi, and on the precipice of inciting significant fan backlash over the underwhelming The Rise of Skywalker. A modestly-scaled affair that substituted operatic save-the-world spectacle for lean samurai-Western action—think an intergalactic version of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo or Sergio Leone’s “Man with No Name” trilogy—the eight-episode series was all the more engaging for stripping down its stakes in service of lone-warrior adventure. As envisioned by Jon Favreau, it was an endeavor less interested […]

Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson are obsessed with time. In each of the writing/directing duo’s features—2012’s Resolution, 2015’s Spring, and 2018’s The Endless—the ability to travel backwards or forwards in history, or to exist eternally, affords insights into the nature of self, and the knotty emotional and psychological dynamics that govern our lives. Cleverly idiosyncratic, they’re genre filmmakers who use their twisty temporal sci-fi conceits for incisive and moving explorations of the human condition. That remains true with Synchronic (in theaters and drive-ins Oct. 23), Moorhead and Benson’s most high-profile and mainstream-accessible release to date. Having worked wonders on relatively low […]