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 […]
Nick Schager
16 posts
“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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Frontier life was tough as hell, and for further proof of that fact, look no further than Barkskins, National Geographic’s small-screen adaptation of the epic 2016 novel by Annie Proulx (Brokeback Mountain). Set in the 1690s, this multifaceted tale concerns the arrival of two men in New France, the northern […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]