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 […]
Nick Schager
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Arguably the most difficult facet of prosecuting a serial killer case concerns the issue of insanity, since anyone who commits unspeakable atrocities must, in some respect, be out of his or her mind—and thus potentially innocent of premeditation, or able to know right from wrong. That question was essential in the trial of Dennis Nilsen, a Scottish-born resident of London who, in early 1983, was arrested […]
“Cocaine is a hell of a drug,” proclaimed Dave Chappelle’s Rick James, and the same is true of gambling. For proof, just ask Craig Carton, whose world collapsed in 2017 thanks to an addiction to blackjack and the ensuing fraud he perpetrated to pay off his debts. A counselor featured in Wild Card: The Downfall of a Radio Loudmouth equates playing cards for money with snorting […]
Abraham Lincoln was photographed 130 times during the course of his life. But a new Discovery Channel special asks, what if there’s an additional snapshot of the 16th commander-in-chief—on his deathbed? Even setting aside the debatable importance of such a photograph—which wouldn’t prove anything, or provide insights into his final moments—the likelihood that this image could have remained unknown and hidden for 155 years seems very […]
Heir to cinema’s body-horror throne, writer/director Brandon Cronenberg triumphantly follows in dad David’s footsteps with Possessor, a grandly gruesome sci-fi nightmare that traces the blurry line between the psychological and the corporeal, the real and the imagined, and the authentic and the affected. Coming on the heels of his prior 2012 Antiviral, it heralds Cronenberg as a formidable talent in his own right, marking him as […]
Few voices in the metal community are more recognizable—or ferocious—than the one wielded by Corey Taylor, who as frontman for horror-metal juggernaut Slipknot has rightly earned the nickname The Great Big Mouth, and whose work with Stone Sour has allowed him to naturally expand into the hard-rock mainstream. Taylor’s output covers a vast stylistic and emotional range, from rage and misery to heartbreak and longing, and […]
Errol Morris is one of non-fiction cinema’s all-time greats, a godfather of modern true crime thanks to 1988’s The Thin Blue Line, which famously got Randall Dale Adams off of death row. So when he says that another murderer is innocent of the crimes for which he’s been convicted, it’s necessary to listen—if not to instinctively believe him. And yet A Wilderness of Error, FX’s five-part […]
As Sofia Coppola has gotten older, so too have her protagonists, which makes it easy to see them—and their plights—as reflections of the aspirations and anxieties currently preoccupying the auteur. That’s once again true with On the Rocks, the story of a 39-year-old writer struggling with insecurity, suspicions about her husband, and the long shadow cast by her larger-than-life father, here played by Coppola’s Lost in […]
We’re so inundated with evidence of Donald Trump’s fascistic villainy—these days, largely related to the pandemic he’s neglected and mismanaged to the tune of 200,000 dead Americans and counting—that it’s sometimes easy to forget that he’s also a traitorous puppet who won the 2016 election with Russian assistance. Enter Agents of Chaos, a two-part HBO documentary from the insanely prolific Alex Gibney (debuting Sept. 23) which […]
In the history of love stories, few have been as strange and unlikely as the one depicted in My Octopus Teacher. Netflix’s first original South African feature documentary concerns the wholly unexpected, and ostensibly transformative, affair struck between Craig Foster, a South African filmmaker, and an amphibious mollusk that he discovered in the Atlantic Ocean near the small seaside bungalow he frequented as a kid. It’s […]
Robin Williams’ self-inflicted death on Aug. 11, 2014, at the age of 63 shocked the world, not only because few knew that the acclaimed actor had been suffering in any way, but because despite his history of substance-abuse problems, his effusive, uninhibited, hyperactive spirit was so joyous and infectious that it simply didn’t gibe with suicide. With no concrete explanation for why he’d taken his own […]
On a nondescript April night in 1990, 21-year-old Dale Wayne Sigler walked into a Brazoria County, Texas, Subway shop and robbed it of $400. When the man behind the counter, John William Zeltner Jr., attempted to flee into the back room, he was shot six times. The “overkill” nature of the crime implied that the two weren’t mere strangers, and the ensuing revelation that Sigler knew […]
On more than one sunny day during my childhood, my friends and I took a drive down to Vernon, New Jersey’s Action Park, which was advertised incessantly on tri-state area TV as a venue of non-stop good times courtesy of “75 of the wildest, wettest family rides in the world.” While its commercials promised family fun, however, Action Park really delivered a traumatizing sort of excitement, […]
A highly contagious virus spreading rapidly through a crowded indoor space populated by individuals who sometimes put their own interests ahead of those of their fellow man, and a quarantine zone-enforcing government that offers false assurances that everything’s okay and everyone is safe—2016’s Train to Busan is a modern zombie classic that becomes more horrifyingly timely by the minute. Thus, it’s an ideally disquieting moment for […]
The aliens aren’t coming—they may already be here! Or, at least, that’s what recent news suggests the U.S. government suspects. Just this past week, the Pentagon announced it was creating a new task force to look into the existence of UFOs that may have been witnessed flying around and over U.S. military bases. That development was spurred by a New York Times report that, despite previous […]
The only thing more dangerous than monsters in Lovecraft Country are racists—although there are plenty of both in HBO’s new series, and sometimes they’re one and the same. Blending comedy and drama, horror and sci-fi, social commentary and genre thrills, showrunner/writer Misha Green’s adaptation of Matt Ruff’s 2016 novel tackles American intolerance through the prism of author H.P. Lovecraft, whose famed work about ancient, incomprehensible evils […]
Though I might like to claim otherwise, I’m no expert on big-screen T&A&D. Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies, however, makes a bid for being the definitive documentary on the subject. Driven by a cornucopia of film clip and talking heads—led by actors, directors, historians and critics—it delivers a thorough chronological timeline of cinematic nakedness. Too bad, then, that when it comes to actually […]
In space, no one can hear you scream—and that’s also true of being in a secret Soviet research facility circa 1983, the setting of director Egor Abramenko’s Sputnik. A clever riff on Alien (and its sequel) that generates solid suspense from assured formal touches and a story that only succumbs to heavy-handed gestures at a few key moments, it’s a capable horror show that, like its […]
There are varying degrees of bad guys, and per its title, World’s Most Wanted is about the absolute worst of the worst. A six-part Netflix docuseries whose each installment fixates on a different fugitive, it’s a true-crime effort (premiering Aug. 5) that aims to further raise the profile of the globe’s chief villains—and, in doing so, to make their avoidance of the law that much more […]
“Truth is the most important thing,” says Tomasz (Maciej Musiałowski) midway through The Hater, and of all the falsehoods this habitual liar spews, none is more shameless. Still, while deception is Tomasz’s stock-in-trade, there’s plenty of authenticity to be found in writer/director Jan Komasa’s Netflix feature (premiering July 29), whose release was temporarily delayed because its fictional story wound up echoing a real-life tragedy that shook […]
A portrait of the way in which our lives are shaped not only by our parents and the examples they set—and values they instill—but by the traumatic events we’re forced to endure, Father Soldier Son is a quietly incisive and moving Netflix documentary about a military family beset by hardship. Prepare to cry more than once before its opening credits roll, and then make sure to […]
The Painted Bird is a masterful epic about a young unnamed Jewish Boy (Petr Kotlár) navigating a bleak Eastern European landscape during World War II, and when it had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival last September, it was equally praised and decried as brutal and harrowing thanks to its horrifying scenes of murder, pedophilia and bestiality. Ask Czech writer/director Václav Marhoul about that […]
Of the many things we’ve (temporarily) lost thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, late nights at the local bar are one of the most dearly missed—unless, of course, you’re a knucklehead in Florida, Texas, Arizona, Georgia or California who continues to visit watering holes without wearing a mask or practicing social distancing, personal and public safety be damned. For those responsible Americans pining for the beloved and […]
There’s horror in old age—the sort no one wants to think about, or look at, or discuss. It’s in that uncomfortable truth that Relic locates its greatest terror and, in doing so, delivers deep, gnawing dread that lingers long after its credits have rolled. The feature debut of Japanese-Australian filmmaker Natalie Erika James, who co-wrote the script with Christian White, Relic (premiering at drive-in theaters on […]
Watching Dark’s third and final season is like clutching the hand of a person who’s dangling from a helicopter over a vast canyon—you’re just holding on for dear life, desperate to maintain your grip on the wild situation. Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar’s German-language series has always been a masterpiece of time-travel intricacy, and that continues to be true with its closing eight-episode run (premiering […]
Irresistible concludes with a mid-credits interview between writer/director Jon Stewart and Trevor Potter, former chairman of the Federal Election Commission and current president of the Campaign Legal Center. In their very brief exchange, Potter lays out the institutional problems that not only allow for campaign-finance malfeasance, but stymie any legislative or legal attempts to reform it. It’s a concise articulation of a fundamental failing of our […]
Though he wears the wooly red cap that Jacques Cousteau transformed into the emblem of deep sea divers, the figure whom famed oceanic photographer Amos Nachoum most closely resembles in Picture of His Life is fictional: Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab. Possessed by an obsession with a creature of the deep that holds, for him, profound symbolic meaning, Nachoum is a man driven to risk life and […]
From one vantage point, the death of Akai Gurley was a familiar story. On Nov. 20, 2014, while walking down a darkened stairwell with a companion in Brooklyn’s Pink Houses projects, the unarmed 28-year-old black man was shot by a New York City Police Department officer. Though ambulances were called to the scene, Gurley didn’t survive. At a present moment in which George Floyd’s murder has […]
There are few actors as accomplished, or as effortlessly cool, as Delroy Lindo, who for more than three decades has brought a commanding intensity, sharp humor and easygoing magnetism to a wide variety of film, TV and stage roles. That charisma is once again on grand display in Da 5 Bloods, Spike Lee’s Vietnam War film about four vets—played by Lindo, Clarke Peters, Isiah Whitlock Jr. […]
Michael Stuhlbarg elevates everything he’s in—a fact once again confirmed by Shirley, an excellent new biographical film about The Haunting of Hill House writer Shirley Jackson (Elisabeth Moss) from Madeline’s Madeline director Josephine Decker. As Jackson’s husband Stanley Edgar Hyman, an esteemed critic and professor at Vermont’s Bennington College, Stuhlbarg exudes formidable intellect, sharp wit, daunting imperiousness, and a unique mixture of staunch loyalty and brazen […]
Gin is a loudmouth drunk prone to fits of rage and sorrow. Miyuki is a rebellious teen with a fearsome angry streak. And Hana is a trans woman desperate for love and companionship. Brought together by happenstance and need, they’re a motley homeless trio whose wayward lives in Tokyo are forever altered by a Christmas miracle in Tokyo Godfathers, the late animation great Satoshi Kon’s 2003 […]
Considering the cheesy and unsubtle melodrama peddled by White Lines, it’s amazing that it takes until midway through its fourth episode before someone explains its metaphorical title (hint: it doesn’t just refer to cocaine!). Nonetheless, one doesn’t need to wait that long for wholesale absurdity to rear its head in this latest series from Money Heist mastermind Álex Pina, as the craziness begins early and then […]
With a title like Trial by Media, you’d naturally expect Netflix’s true crime series—executive produced by CNN and The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin, alongside George Clooney and Grant Heslov—to focus on the multifaceted ways print and TV reporting affected, for better or worse, high-profile legal cases. Like a student term paper that sporadically forgets to relate all of its evidence to its thesis statement, the streaming […]