Nick Schager

During the 2000s, horror fans were besieged by remakes that were neither wanted nor liked, including (but not limited to) 2003’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 2005’s The Fog and The Amityville Horror, 2006’s Black Christmas, The Hills Have Eyes, The Wicker Man, The Omen and When a Stranger Calls, 2008’s Prom Night, 2009’s Friday the 13th and The Stepfather, and 2010’s A Nightmare on Elm Street. It was a dreary era of substandard do-overs that put a glossy modern sheen on works that had never demanded such treatment, and save for the rare exception (notably, Rob Zombie’s two Halloween films), they […]

Tom Cruise is Hollywood’s last great movie star, and though his baby face is vanishing, he hasn’t stopped fighting Father Time, continuing to embark upon daredevil cinematic endeavors that reconfirm his eternal youthfulness. Top Gun: Maverick (May 27) is an overt attempt at clinging to the past, a revisitation of the 1986 hit that propelled Cruise to the A-list stratosphere—and epitomized the decade’s hyper-flashy gung-ho spirit—through a combination of sonic-boom military showdowns, gauzy romance, Top 40 soundtrack singles, and sweaty homoerotic posturing. Yet more than that, director Joseph Kosinski’s sequel is a reaffirmation of its headliner’s peerless stardom and, with it, […]

The idea for The Pentaverate dates back to 1993—and so too does its humor. Based on a riff from 1993’s So I Married an Axe Murderer, Mike Myers’ six-part Netflix series (out today) is a return to the former Saturday Night Live star’s Peter Sellers-ish comedic roots, affording him the opportunity to play a variety of disparate characters with prosthetic-make-up faces and exaggerated accents. It’s a routine that once paid blockbuster dividends via the Austin Powers franchise but has been DOA since 2008’s disastrous The Love Guru. Nonetheless, time hasn’t dimmed Myers’ enthusiasm for this particular brand of nonsense, which is […]

Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s 13-part The Staircase is one of the true-crime genre’s foundational texts, and a definitive examination of the case of Michael Peterson, who was accused (and eventually convicted) of killing his wife Kathleen in 2001. HBO Max’s eight-episode dramatization of Peterson’s saga (May 5), therefore, would seem to be wholly unnecessary—which is why its excellence is so surprising and satisfying. Spearheaded by writer/director Antonio Campos (Afterschool, The Devil All the Time), this intriguing based-on-real-events miniseries walks the same ambiguous line as its predecessor, all while integrating de Lestrade’s non-fiction production into its primary action. An adaptation that both complements […]

Doctor Strange is an arrogant know-it-all who likes to conjure spells by making lots of twirly hand motions, and it’s a testament to Benedict Cumberbatch’s droll charisma that the Marvel Cinematic Universe member doesn’t come off as a grating snob. Like Robert Downey Jr.’s franchise bedrock Iron Man, he’s a second-tier comic book character whose status has been elevated by the actor chosen to play him, and having made a modest introduction in 2016’s Doctor Strange and then a big-leagues splash in Spider-Man: No Way Home, Cumberbatch’s magic-wielding superhero now receives a proper slam-bang blockbuster of his own with Doctor Strange […]

Often compared to Breaking Bad—another story about ostensibly ordinary Americans turning to lives of crime—Netflix’s Ozark always appeared headed for a similarly dire conclusion, with at least some of its principals meeting a fatal end. Still, predicting the precise nature of that outcome was thwarted by the cagey plotting of its fourth and final season, whose last episode upended expectations by letting its bad guys get away—and, in the process, cemented the show’s portrait of capitalist enterprise as a war winnable only by those willing to fully embrace their ruthless amorality, and able to control their wilder impulses. “Everything’s bearable,” says […]

Eric C. Conn is a flamboyant figure out of a crime movie, and that’s exactly how he wanted to be seen, imagining himself as Eastern Kentucky’s very own version of James Bond. Even his name seems almost too good to be true, given that Conn eventually earned himself national notoriety for perpetrating the largest fraud in the history of the Social Security administration, to the tune of over $550 million. A man who stole a fortune of taxpayer funds for himself and his clients, harassed federal witnesses and destroyed evidence, got married 16 (or was it 17?) times to a variety […]

Gaspar Noé is a renowned conductor of nightmares, and with Vortex, he takes a deep dive into realistic trauma and terror. The story of an elderly French couple battling burgeoning dementia, Vortex is something of a left turn for the Irreversible and Climax auteur, patiently charting its protagonists as they navigate harrowing final days full of confusion, fear, frustration, and mounting peril. Far less flashy and in your face than much of his prior work, Noé’s latest remains a formally bold and distinctive drama, employing a meticulous aesthetic design and two superb lead performances to craft a chilling portrait of the […]

Gaslit comes at the Watergate scandal sideways, focusing on the courageous efforts of Martha Mitchell—wife of President Richard Nixon’s attorney general John Mitchell—to publicly blame the commander-in-chief for the infamous break-in and ensuing cover-up. Martha’s outspokenness resulted in humiliation, abuse and ostracism, and Robbie Pickering’s Starz series (based on Leon Neyfakh’s podcast Slow Burn) would like to reconfigure this notorious historical saga as a case study in sexist marginalization. Too bad, then, that it lacks the focus, and perspective, necessary to make such a case, which might have been better achieved had the eight-installment affair (April 24) been conceived as a […]

Cinematic perfection may be technically unattainable, but good luck finding a flaw with Petite Maman, French auteur Céline Sciamma’s tender and moving tale about a young girl named Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) who, while helping her parents clean out the rural home of her recently deceased grandmother, strikes up a friendship with a girl named Marion (Gabrielle Sanz) who looks just like her, sounds just like her, and turns out to be her eight-year-old mother. It’s a magical turn of events, and it forms the basis for Sciamma’s 72-minute children’s fable about loss, grief and the desire to communion with the past […]

Rayan Sarlak is the scene-stealer of the year, a force of personality so exuberant and endearing that Hit the Road can barely contain him—not that it would want to under any circumstances. A pint-sized motormouth who can’t stop asking questions, crawling about the backseat of his family’s SUV (and the father who shares it with him), and running around with reckless abandon, his voice as loud as his growls are spontaneous, he’s a whirlwind of motion, sound and energy, and exactly the sort of rambunctious spirit that belongs on the expansive silver screen. It’s no surprise that, when he’s introduced pretend-playing […]

Joe Francis embodied all that was crass, gross and offensive about the early 2000s, and Rich & Shameless: Girls Gone Wild Exposed—the first installment of TNT’s new pop-culture docuseries—only reaffirms that impression. A two-hour event premiering on Saturday, April 23, it’s a blunt-instrument exposé about the founder and impresario of Girls Gone Wild, the once-ubiquitous DVD franchise predicated on footage of random inebriated girls at nightclubs and beaches taking their tops off for the cameras. Low class? Definitely. Exploitative? Inarguably. And yet even in light of Girls Gone Wild’s deservedly horrible reputation, director/producer Katinka Blackford Newman’s non-fiction inquiry reveals the true […]

As one character opines in The Offer, you don’t need to know how art works to enjoy it, and yet Paramount+’s series about the making of The Godfather—timed to the film’s 50th anniversary—believes the exact opposite. Akin to the studio giving itself a big sopping wet tongue kiss in the mirror, this 10-episode streaming affair (premiering April 28) is a cinema-loving counterpart to HBO’s recent Winning Time, operating as a cartoony behind-the-scenes look at a pop-culture sensation that articulates everything in bursts of groan-worthy exposition delivered by cornball caricatures. Early on, its protagonist remarks about the unparalleled power of the movies, […]

Given its grating feistiness, Sonic the Hedgehog’s status as the all-time highest-grossing video game-based movie in America is a depressing indictment of the genre, whose reputation won’t be improved by that blockbuster’s sequel, Sonic the Hedgehog 2. A comparable follow-up that whizzes about delivering action, wisecracks, pop-culture allusions and more than a few groan-worthy declarations about the importance of family and the nature of heroism, it’ll surely charm adolescent fans of the first film. Anyone over the age of 12, however, had best beware. Director Jeff Fowler’s sequel (in theaters April 8) certainly works hard to appeal to Gen-Xers who grew […]

Michael Bay is the master of maximalism, a cinematic conductor who orchestrates every shot, explosion, and soundtrack cue into a symphony of sexualized carnage. Though once slandered as the epitome of shallow style over substance, the director now—in a Marvel-dominated era of production-line blockbuster homogeneity—stands out as a uniquely vulgar visionary, his films an orgiastic expression of his gung-ho dudebro machismo. Trading in distilled adrenalized insanity, Ambulance is cast in the same mold, save for the fact that it spurns the CGI overload of his Transformers extravaganzas for visceral practical-effects mayhem. A tale of two bank robbers who attempt to escape […]

Michael Mann returns to the scene of small-screen urban crime with Tokyo Vice, whose title implies a connection to his iconic ’80s hit Miami Vice but whose story proves to be a unique investigation of the Japanese underworld and the unlikely duo that attempt to drag its ugliness into the light. Loosely adapted by showrunner J.T. Rogers from Daily Beast contributor Jake Adelstein’s memoir Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan, the 10-episode HBO Max series (April 7) is a sensually stylish affair about the tangled ties that bind the police, reporters, and the country’s reigning Yakuza […]

Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore follows in the footsteps of Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald in that just as that 2018 predecessor featured virtually no crimes, this third installment in the Harry Potter prequel franchise boasts no genuine secrets. The revelation that Dumbledore is gay is both not a bombshell (since it was overtly implied by the last film, following years of public declarations by J.K. Rowling herself) and the sort of tepid eye-opener that only the most die-hard of Potterphiles will care about—something that can also be said about the endeavor as a whole. Functional yet never magical, […]

On September 18, 1977, Hazen, Arkansas’s Gary Betzner took a daytime drive with his wife and daughter in his El Camino to a dairy bar. Afterwards, he stopped on a bridge due to car trouble, opened the hood to check on the problem, and then suddenly and inexplicably dove into the White River. This sent his wife Sally into hysterics, and cast an immediate and terrible pall over his family, which—like everyone else in their small, rural southern town—was plagued by a single, persistent question: why? [Spoilers follow] For an answer to that query, directors Phil Lott and Ari Mark (and […]

The king of man-child comedy, Judd Apatow turns his attention to self-referential moviemaking spoofery with The Bubble, a limp saga (April 1, Netflix) about the disastrous birth of a would-be blockbuster. Loosely inspired by the real-life production of Universal’s upcoming Jurassic Park: Dominion, Apatow’s latest details the creation of franchise sequel Cliff Beasts 6 during a global pandemic, which requires cast and crew to hole up in an English mansion for months on end to complete the dino-rampage project under strict quarantine guidelines. What follows is cabin fever, chaos and carnage, both on set and off. Less ever-present, alas, are actual […]

Debuting nearly two years after its originally scheduled release date, Morbius is the beneficiary of fortuitous timing, opening as it is in the wake of Sony’s sky-high superhero successes Venom: Let There Be Carnage and Spider-Man: No Way Home. Alas, at least some of the goodwill generated by those Marvel efforts is squandered by Daniel Espinosa’s origin story for vampiric Michael Morbius, another Spider-Man adversary who’s been reconfigured into a cursed antihero. Designed to expand the studio’s web-slinging cinematic universe, this generic monster mash adheres to such a rote formula that its every move feels lethargically mechanical. Jared Leto’s bat-man isn’t […]

Childhood is a time of figuring out who you are, what you like, and how you want to present yourself to the world—and occasionally, that process also results in behavior that, in hindsight, might be embarrassing or reprehensible. Investigating those experiences in order to comprehend what they say about us—both then and now—can be an uncomfortable undertaking. That’s precisely the mission embarked upon by When We Were Bullies, acclaimed filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt’s Oscar-nominated short documentary about a traumatic incident from his past, the memories that it evokes, and the lessons he comes to learn about the target of his bad behavior, […]

The most striking moment in Surviving Sex Trafficking comes late, when survivor Rachel Fischer strolls down a street in Budapest, only to be engaged by a group of random men. These burly guys come across as jovial, but almost immediately, one of them solicits her with cash. Another man named Richard admits that he’s a pimp who, because prostitution is illegal in Hungary, does most of his business in Switzerland and elsewhere. As these strangers continue to chuckle, Rachel strings them along, compelling Richard to confess, “I can give work.” As Rachel later explains, the allure of this proposition is that […]

Ti West gets back to the throwback horror of his 2009 gem The House of the Devil with this weekend’s X, a gnarly slasher about a ragtag 1979 porn movie crew that sets up production at a rented cabin on the farmland property of an elderly couple, and winds up getting more than they bargained for from their hosts. Riffing on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre while carving out its own unique portrait of multigenerational tensions—and the madness they can spawn—West’s latest is a gory and grimly funny battle of the ages, much of it pivoting around the twisted dynamic that develops […]

Many Americans may not be familiar with Jane Birkin, the English-French actress and singer who was famously involved (and collaborated) with legendary pop star Serge Gainsbourg during the 1970s. Unfortunately, Jane by Charlotte, a study of the artist by her acclaimed actress/musician daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg (Nymphomaniac), won’t provide great illumination for those not already in the know, as it paints a portrait of their relationship that’s so devoid of context, or even basic biographical information, that it plays as more of a personal rumination than a work for a wide audience. Nestled within its non-fiction action are glimpses of the strengths […]

Minx is epitomized by the closing shot of its fourth episode, in which a hunky male model struts in slow motion, brimming with empowered confidence thanks to his recent feminist awakening, his giant dick swinging in the air. There’s plenty more where that came from in Ellen Rapoport’s HBO Max comedy (March 17), which takes an amusingly breezy look at the creation of a groundbreaking (fictional) 1970s erotic magazine for women. Headlined by the winning pair of Jake Johnson and Ophelia Lovibond, it’s a romantic comedy about multifaceted forms of liberation and equality—as well as a lighthearted romp marked by more […]

Great Freedom takes its title from the name of a nightclub that Hans Hoffmann (Transit’s Franz Rogowski) attends in 1969 at the conclusion of Sebastian Meise’s wrenching drama (out now in theaters)—an establishment of uninhibited homosexuality, now that Germany’s anti-gay Paragraph 175 statute has been relaxed. Nonetheless, true freedom is a tricky and complicated commodity in the director’s long-awaited follow-up to 2011’s Still Life, especially for Hans, who’s repeatedly incarcerated over decades under the aforementioned law for the crime of wanting to be with other men. A portrait of liberation flourishing in unexpected places, it pulses with quiet anguish, longing and […]

Travis Kalanick is not Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, and that’s confirmed by the fact that the average American likely doesn’t know his name. Nonetheless, the co-founder and former CEO of Uber certainly fancied himself as a similar paradigm-shifting “disruptor,” and his desire to transform the world—and make himself a veritable “God”—is the subject of Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber, an eight-part Showtime drama (Feb. 27) about Kalanick’s efforts to launch and grow the ride-sharing service, and his eventual downfall due to a litany of sexual harassment complaints, and accusations that he ignored them while fostering a corporate […]

On January 31, 1865, the United States House of Representatives passed the 13th Amendment to the Constitution (by only two votes), thereby abolishing slavery throughout the country. Lincoln’s Dilemma is the story of how that landmark legislation came to be, the man who made it a reality, and the reasons he fought so hard for it in the face of fierce opposition from both his Democratic rivals and his own fellow Republicans. Apple TV+’s four-part docuseries (Feb. 18) may strain at times to add a timely framework to its material and to craft a more “complicated” snapshot of the 16th commander-in-chief. […]

Marriage is misery in Fishbowl Wives (out now), and in most instances, the best way to alleviate that unhappiness is by falling into the arms of a man or woman who isn’t your spouse. Infidelity comes in all sorts of variations—and occurs for all types of reasons—in Netflix’s eight-part Japanese series (based on Ryô Kurosawa’s popular manga Kingyo Tsuma), which blends episodic storytelling with an ongoing serialized plot about an unlikely extramarital romance and the trouble it causes for everyone involved. While Fishbowl Wives’ title might not immediately tip one off about its subject matter, it quickly hammers home its central […]

In a TV landscape littered with dark, gritty dramas and cornball comedies, it’s refreshing to find a show as funny, soothing, surprising and downright idiosyncratic as Painting with John, and credit for that triumph goes almost completely to its creator and host, John Lurie. Initially rising to fame as the founder and frontman for the Lounge Lizards jazz ensemble, the 69-year-old musician has also dabbled in both the movies (acting in Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise and Down by Law, and doing the soundtrack for Get Shorty) and on television (with the short-lived, but now cult-classic Fishing with John, in which […]

The case of a film inspiring a video game giving birth to another film, Uncharted is an adaptation of Naughty Dog’s excellent Indiana Jones-esque PlayStation series that arrives in theaters following a torturously long development process that began back in 2008. Fourteen years later, the fruits of that labor are meager, as Zombieland director Ruben Fleischer’s action-adventure is a by-the-books treasure-hunting lark that’s been done a million times before and is headlined by a miscast Tom Holland. Like its source material, it’s been modeled after far more illustrious predecessors, the problem being that without the platformer’s interactivity, what’s left is merely […]

Steven Soderbergh isn’t just one of the world’s most accomplished directors; he’s also one of its most eclectic, segueing between genres—and cinematic techniques and formats—with bold and inventive flair. On the heels of last year’s stellar 1950s crime drama No Sudden Move, the restless director once again shifts gears with Kimi, a lean Hitchcockian thriller about a single woman named Angela (Zoë Kravitz) who, while analyzing data streams collected by an Alexa-style personal assistant, stumbles upon what she believes to be a recording of a violent crime. Getting to the bottom of that mystery, however, proves more difficult than initially appeared, […]

What looks like prestige TV, sounds like prestige TV, and acts like prestige TV, but is in fact just a melodramatic copycat pretending to have serious thoughts in its head? That would be Suspicion, Apple TV+’s new eight-part English-language adaptation of Israel’s False Flag series, which alternates between being wholly preposterous and egregiously preachy. Were that not enough, though, this U.K. production headlined by Uma Thurman and Noah Emmerich is also interminably dull, dispensing red-herring clues regarding its central mystery with all the grace of a jackhammer and the intrigue of a TED Talk. Suspicion (Feb. 4) concerns the abduction of […]

There hasn’t been a lot to laugh about over the past two years, which might be why South Park has been relatively dormant. Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s animated Comedy Central hit has long rooted its humor in timely concerns, and while that’s continued to be true during the pandemic, it’s resulted in only a quartet of COVID-era specials, the last of which—November’s South Park: Post Covid and December’s follow-up, South Park Post Covid: The Return of Covid—imagined a dismal future in which the world was still grappling with the viral plague. Thus, as the series finally returns for a proper […]

Vladimir Putin is a tyrant who thinks himself unassailable, so his refusal to even utter the name Alexei Navalny speaks volumes about the profoundly discomfiting effect the opposition leader, presidential candidate and anti-corruption activist has had on Russia’s leader. Referring to Navalny as “that character” and “that person,” Putin’s hatred of the dissident stems from the fact that, as one supporter puts it, “he is now the symbol of Russia’s freedom,” and that rage came to a head on August 20, 2020, when during a flight from the Siberian town of Tomsk to Moscow, Navalny fell ill—the victim, it turned out, […]

Hugh Hefner founded his Playboy empire on a supposed ethos of pro-female sexual freedom and liberation, but Secrets of Playboy paints a far uglier picture of the culture he created, and the behavior he encouraged—and participated in—during his reign. A&E’s 10-part docuseries is a no-holds-barred censure of the pipe-smoking, silk pajama-wearing mogul, casting him as a predator who personally raped, coerced, and dominated Playmates, allowed his friends and celebrities (among them Bill Cosby) to do likewise, and fashioned a cult-like environment to satisfy his incessant appetite for sex and power. Damning evidence and accusations abound in this exposé, made all the […]

The fifth of Alcoholics Anonymous’ 12 steps is to admit “to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs”—the reason being that honest confrontation of past misdeeds and mistakes is central to any process of recovery. That sort of open acknowledgment, however, is largely absent from the work carried out by the Mohammed bin Nayef Counseling and Care Center, a Saudi Arabian treatment facility that was founded by its namesake to help rehabilitate Islamic terrorists. Certainly, no one profiled by Jihad Rehab (premiering Jan. 22 at the Sundance Film Festival) seems interested in truly confessing […]

With the first half of his Netflix hit’s fourth and final season, showrunner Chris Mundy has initiated Ozark’s endgame, setting the stage for a last-ditch attempt by Marty (Jason Bateman) and Wendy Byrde (Laura Linney) to escape their money-laundering entanglements with the Navarro cartel while keeping their (and their kids’) heads on their shoulders. Achieving that goal won’t be easy, given that the streaming series’ most recent seven episodes mired them in further lethal trouble. Their efforts to solidify their political power via a partnership with Shaw Medical Solutions didn’t go as planned. Their relationship with son Jonah (Skylar Gaertner) took […]

Downfall: The Case Against Boeing is a story about how a revered company compromised its reputation in five short months—except, however, that Rory Kennedy’s documentary argues that this process actually began years earlier, when Boeing, once the standard-bearer for airline safety, efficiency, reliability and performance, was purchased in 1997 by McDonnell Douglas. That merger initiated Boeing’s fundamental transformation into a manufacturer that cared less about quality control than its stock price. The ramifications of that makeover were plain to see in October 2018 and March 2019, when two Boeing 737 Max aircrafts fell from the sky, killing over three hundred people […]

According to The Puppet Master: Hunting the Ultimate Conman, Robert Hendy-Freegard is a 49-year-old British fraudster who deceives, swindles and psychologically manipulates and abuses females for his own profit. A reprehensible criminal who poses as an MI5 agent in order to gain the trust—and then cooperation, and money—of men and women, he’s spent the past three decades tricking a variety of victims into completely giving themselves over to him, in the process costing them their careers, families, friends, and financial well-being. Worse, though, is that directors Sam Bernstead and Gareth Johnson’s three-part Netflix docuseries reveals that he’s still at large, continuing […]

In Archive 81, cinema is a figurative and literal gateway to other worlds. The notion that the movies are a transportive portal is nothing particularly new—especially in the horror genre—but showrunner Rebecca Sonnenshine and executive producer James Wan’s eight-part Netflix series (based on Daniel Powell and Marc Sollinger’s podcast of the same name) nonetheless finds new ways to enliven its underlying idea, along the way paying tribute to the many chilling ancestors that paved the way for its malevolent tale about a young man tasked with restoring video tapes about a calamity that befell a community decades earlier. Taking a kitchen-sink […]

For all of its self-referentiality, the Scream franchise has never addressed a fundamental cine-reality: namely, that slasher film series almost always suffer steep drop-offs in quality with each successive sequel. That’s true of Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson’s brainchild as well, which hit its nadir with 2011’s Scream 4, a dutiful installment that floundered in its attempts to play with the conventions of reboots. Following that episode, it was fair to assume we’d finally, mercifully, seen the last of Ghostface. Alas, nothing with name-brand appeal remains dead in Hollywood, and ten years later, Ready or Not directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler […]

Replacing boardrooms with megachurches, private planes and limousines with steer horn-adorned Cadillacs and glitzy party buses, and dapper suits and designer dresses with leopard-print shoes and white cowboy hats, The Righteous Gemstones is a lunatic Southern televangelist variation on Succession. Returning to HBO for its second season on Jan. 9, Danny McBride’s alternately absurdist and heartfelt skewering of those who peddle religion for profit is a kindred spirit to the cable network’s dramatic powerhouse, rife with toxic masculine dysfunction and hostile tensions between entitled sons who want to inherit their fathers’ empires (and earn their love) while simultaneously establishing their own […]

John Cena has a lunkheaded charm that serves him exceptionally well in Peacemaker, writer/director James Gunn’s spin-off from his 2021 superhero sequel The Suicide Squad. As its title implies, Gunn’s eight-episode HBO Max series (Jan. 13) focuses on Cena’s patriotic psychopath, whose ironic ethos is summed up by his feature-film proclamation, “I cherish peace with all my heart. I don’t care how many men, women and children I need to kill to get it.” A contract murderer whom everyone considers a racist even though he views himself as a good guy, Cena’s Peacemaker is a homicidal hot-button antihero for our fake […]

Dennis Rader, aka the BTK Killer (for “bind, torture, kill”), was one of the 20th century’s most heinous serial killers. He was also one of its greatest criminal copycats, inspired to become a notorious psychopath by True Detective magazine and predecessors such as Richard “Dick” Hickock and Perry Smith (the ex-cons whose murder of the Clutter family was the basis for Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood) and Harvey Glatman (aka the Lonely Hearts Killer). A self-described “monster” with a sadistic fixation on bondage, strangulation, domination, and hanging, he idolized America’s most infamous, studying their habits and techniques so he might employ […]

Peter Dinklage isn’t one to repeat himself, and he’s proven that once again with Cyrano, a musical adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s classic 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac that boasts songs by The National and the actor in the title role as a crooning poet who expresses his love for fair Roxanne (Haley Bennett) by writing letters to her on behalf of soldier Christian (Kelvin Harrison Jr.). It is, on the one hand, a clear departure from Dinklage’s acclaimed performance as the scheming Tyrion on Game of Thrones. Yet it’s perhaps not as vast a divergence as it might initially appear, since […]

Who, precisely, is Cobra Kai for? If it’s adults who grew up with, and continue to adore, The Karate Kid films, it’s difficult to understand why they would want to endure a ceaseless barrage of tween drama, pitifully choreographed martial-arts combat, and lame humor barely fit for a TGIF sitcom. And if it’s young kids who want some cheesy Disney Channel-grade action, it’s impossible to fathom why they would care about the proceedings’ infatuation with all things ’80s. The show’s melding of the juvenile and the nostalgic appears to be an attempt to target two separate audiences, yet its childish corniness […]

When George Lucas chose to continue his Star Wars trilogy with 1999’s The Phantom Menace, he did so with the knowledge that there was intense fan demand and, crucially, also more story to tell. That’s not the case with The Matrix series, whose original (premiering the same year as Lucas’ prequel, and stealing much of its thunder) remains hugely influential for its bullet-time effects and red pill simulation-theory fantasy, but whose severely underwhelming sequels ended both its tale and widespread franchise interest. Thus, The Matrix Resurrections (Dec. 22, in theaters and on HBO Max) arrives on a wave of middling excitement […]

Marvel’s multiverse is a concept that, creatively and strategically, allows for endless reinvention and massive proliferation, both of which are the guiding principles behind Spider-Man: No Way Home, a gargantuan sequel (in theaters Dec. 17) that sets the franchise on an alternate-realities course by expanding to include not only its own characters but also those from Sony’s earlier web-slinging series. Chief among that cast are Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe) and Doc Ock (Alfred Molina) and Electro (Jamie Foxx)—oh my!—yet there are many more surprising faces populating this would-be blockbuster, some of them wearing arachnid-y masks. The past and the present smash […]

LaSalle County, Illinois’ Starved Rock State Park is named after a violent incident involving two warring Native American tribes and on March 14, 1960, it forever cemented its connection to brutality when three women—50-year-old Lillian Oetting, 50-year-old Mildred Lindquist, and 47-year-old Frances Murphy—were murdered in its St. Louis Canyon. Out for a hike that wintery day while vacationing without their husbands, the trio were bound, possibly sexually assaulted, and bludgeoned to death with a combination of a giant log, a pair of their binoculars, and their camera, after which they were dragged into a nearby cave where they were arranged side-by-side […]

For all of the punchlines it spawned, The Human Centipede (First Sequence) remains a legitimately transgressive shlock provocation whose power to stun and repulse hasn’t diminished since its 2009 release. Body horror nightmares don’t come more deranged than Dutch director Tom Six’s film, and though many have strived to match its extreme perversity in the years following its debut, few have succeeded. Nonetheless, that hasn’t stopped artists from continuing to try, and the latest example of that is Netflix’s Two, a Spanish import from director Mar Targarona and producer Rodar y Rodar (The Orphanage, Julia’s Eyes) that aims for thrills by […]

Paul Verhoeven is a satiric provocateur who genuinely believes in—and is drawn to—the power and passion of sex. Benedetta is thus an ideal vehicle for the Basic Instinct, Showgirls and Elle director, recounting the inspired-by-real-events ordeal of a 17th century nun who thought herself the bride of Christ and expressed her divine love through a lesbian affair. Pain, piety, sin, and desire all collide in this hot-to-trot import (in theaters now), which critiques the church and its notions of legitimate holiness via a tale that’s as playfully blasphemous as it is erotic—both of which are epitomized by the unforgettable sight of […]

Does Alex Gibney sleep? In the past two years alone, the tireless documentarian has directed four feature-length films (The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, Citizen K, Crazy, Not Insane and Totally Under Control), two two-part, four-hour cable docuseries (Agents of Chaos and The Crime of the Century), and one episode of a non-fiction series (The Innocence Files)—not to mention produced a handful of other likeminded efforts. On top of that enormous slate, he now delivers The Forever Prisoner, an inquiry into the tale of Abu Zubaydah, a Saudi Arabian who’s been detained by the U.S. since March 2002 (and […]

Just as grown-ups frequently pine for their youth, kids are often desperate to cast off their adolescence in favor of adulthood—not realizing that with advanced age comes enhanced responsibilities. That life lesson is learned the hard way by the protagonist of Elves, a six-part Danish horror saga that concerns a family’s vacation to a remote island populated by wary locals and, more menacing still, by mythic creatures. It’s a hermetic community that abides by a unique set of rules designed to keep those beasts at bay, although in Stefan Jaworski’s series, real trouble arises not from irrational monsters but, rather, from […]

“How do we draw that line of what’s real and what’s not?” asks one of the many paranormal experts and authors featured in Shock Docs: Demon in the White House. When it comes to this Discovery+ special, the answer is easy. Premiering on Discovery+ on Nov. 26, Shock Docs: Demon in the White House strives to paint 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as the haunted home of a demonic presence. According to the talking heads participating in director Brook Linder’s “documentary,” this makes sense because no residence is as secretive as the White House, and secretive places are obviously hotbeds of paranormal activity. […]

Thanks to Netflix’s Squid Game and Apple TV+’s Dr. Brain, South Korea has lately become a wellspring of binge-worthy streaming entertainment, and that trend continues with Hellbound, a new Netflix series from Train to Busan director Yeon Sang-ho that, like his modern zombie classic, focuses on the social unrest that arises in the wake of inexplicable supernatural phenomena. In this instance, that would be the sudden appearance of angels who prophesize people’s impending deaths and eternal damnation, and a trio of demonic goliaths that carry out those executions for all to see. Unsurprisingly, this rocks the citizens of Seoul, what with […]

Adrienne Shelly was an actress, a director, a mother, a wife, and a friend, and her life was cut terribly, unthinkably, unjustly short on Nov. 1, 2006, when 19-year-old construction worker Diego Pillco broke into her apartment with intent to rob her and, upon being discovered by Shelly, fatally strangled her and then hung her in the bathroom in an attempt to make it appear that she’d committed suicide. Those are the gruesome details of Shelly’s death, and they’re not shied away from in Adrienne, a new documentary premiering on HBO on Dec. 1 following its debut at the DOC NYC […]

Taylor Sheridan makes movies and TV shows about rugged men doing rugged things in rugged locales. On the heels of the return of his cable-TV hit Yellowstone, he delivers more of the same with Mayor of Kingstown, a 10-episode Paramount+ drama (Nov. 14)—co-created by and co-starring Yellowstone vet Hugh Dillon—about Mike McLusky, the unofficial ruler of the fictional Michigan city of Kingstown, home to seven prisons in a 10-mile radius. A hardscrabble working-class enclave where tensions run high between inmates and guards, cops and drug dealers, and criminals and civilians, Kingstown is a quagmire where everyone is literally and figuratively trapped […]

Tom McCarthy’s Oscar-winning Spotlight is a stirring tribute to the Boston Globe reporters who exposed the scourge of sexual abuse perpetrated (and covered up) by the Catholic Church, but what it fails to fully evoke is the life-altering trauma suffered by the victims of the church’s monstrous priests and bishops. Those individuals’ harrowing stories are the heart of Procession, a masterful new documentary from Robert Greene that charts the efforts of six Midwestern men to cope with their appalling childhood ordeals through the prism of cinematic drama. As deftly constructed as it is unbearably heartbreaking, Greene’s latest is a self-conscious endeavor […]

Yellowstone is predicated on two intertwined national myths: one about manifest destiny, rugged American individualism and man’s dominion over nature (all of which is filtered through cinematic Western iconography and lore), and the other about the besieged condition of modern frontiersman, beset as they are by forces both local (Native Americans) and foreign (coastal hedge-fund elitists). Via its tale of the powerful Dutton clan, owners of the largest ranch in Montana, it depicts the heartland as the embodiment of classical American values and history, and thus a stronghold against contemporary threats that would undermine and seize it for their themselves and […]

The Donald Trump presidency was a disgraceful disaster, what with all the grifting and colluding and treason and insurrection. Yet it was also an embarrassment of comedic riches, most of it due to Trump and company’s preternatural ability to say and do the dumbest and most ludicrous things imaginable. Sitting at a tiny desk. Complaining about toilets. Promoting bleach as a COVID cure. Remarking that George Washington “took over airports” during the Revolutionary War. Suggesting we nuke hurricanes. Drinking a bottle of water with two hands. Being laughed at by the UN General Assembly. Claiming the moon was part of Mars. […]

No one plays dysfunctional men in personal and professional crisis like Jim Cummings, as once again evidenced by The Beta Test, a hilarious, suspenseful and altogether original satiric thriller about the empty phoniness of the film industry. Talent agents take a vicious beating in this genre hybrid, and so too do a few other Hollywood denizens thanks to their decision to accept a mysterious offer that arrives in their mailbox with no warning and even fewer clues about its origins. Co-written and co-directed with PJ McCabe, Cummings’ latest is a puzzle-box skewering of a foul culture and the men responsible for […]

A buddy action-comedy that blends elements of James Bond, Mission: Impossible, Entrapment, Indiana Jones, True Lies, The Fugitive, and many, many more, Red Notice is a welcome throwback to the days before omnipresent franchises and IP, when movie stars and original (or, in this case, “original”) blockbusters ruled the industry. Of course, writer/director Rawson Marshall Thurber’s spectacular isn’t—save for one limited week, beginning Nov. 5—arriving in multiplexes as its predecessors did; rather, it’s debuting on Netflix (Nov. 12) as the streaming platform’s most expensive endeavor to date, at a reported cost of upwards of $200 million. Nonetheless, there’s something refreshingly old […]

Seacia Pavao/Showtime Eight years after he fled into the wilderness in one of the most deflating finales ever, serial killer Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall) returns for more gruesome mayhem in Dexter: New Blood, a Showtime revival (Nov. 7) that, per its title, introduces a host of novel characters who may share its protagonist’s taste for carnage. As far as reclamation projects go, it certainly gets the series back on solid ground after its disastrous 2013 send-off—and, for that matter, its subpar last two seasons. Yet despite a different locale and collection of supporting players, it remains the same old show, […]

Over the course of five seasons, Narcos and Narcos: Mexico have been as bleak—and consistently great—as anything on television, and that holds true for the latter’s closing run, which solidifies the series’ standing as the definitive drama about the 1970s-1990s drug trade. Set in the lush jungles, arid deserts, and sweltering metropolises of South America and Mexico, Netflix’s trafficking saga (returning Nov. 5) is a jet-black neo-noir driven by a despondency that knows no bounds. As always, there’s scant uplift here—just an overarching recognition that there’s no hope for justice, for peace, for answers, for absolution, or for the monstrous horrors […]

The world has radically changed since Curb Your Enthusiasm last went off the air in March 2020. Yet as the HBO series resumes its cringe-worthy run tonight (Oct. 24), Larry David remains the same impossibly combative and antisocial curmudgeon that he’s always been. Season 11’s premiere, “The Five-Foot Fence,” finds the comedian as awkwardly hilarious as ever. In a twist, though, it largely doesn’t have him grapple with the pandemic, which in light of Larry’s prior people-hating behavior, seemed like it would have struck him as a lockdown dream come true. COVID-19 is merely a minor element of Curb Your Enthusiasm’s […]

For all of its melodramatic flourishes, The Raincoat Killer: Chasing a Predator in Korea takes murder—and the trauma it inflicts on others—very seriously. A three-part Netflix docuseries about South Korea’s most notorious serial killer rampage, it repeatedly fixates on the grief, regret, guilt and anguish of both the police officers who worked the case, and the relatives of the fiend’s many victims. Such sensitivity lends emotional weight to its non-fiction tale, which involved the inexplicable deaths of numerous individuals from various walks of life, and which eventually played out in a fashion that was so movie-ish, it would be borderline unbelievable […]

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 […]