When producers or actors new to television claim they’ve just made “a 10-hour movie,” it speaks to the weird inferiority complex TV somehow still has two decades after prestige game-changers such as The Sopranos, The Wire, et. al. But it’s also often a sadly literal comment, suggesting that film people …
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There’s a long tradition in film and TV comedy of the “alt,” where writers come up with multiple jokes for the same moment in the script, wait for the actors to perform them all on camera, then decide which to keep and which ones to cut. So if, say, the …
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U.K. YouTube star Rapman, born Andrew Onwubolu in South-East London, makes a sensational feature debut as writer, director, and actor. His trilogy of short films dubbed Shiro’s Story went viral in 2018 and that energy continues to combust in Blue Story, his first cinema calling-card. On the surface, the plot …
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Did you know that the iconic French mime Marcel Marceau (1923-2007) was once an unsung hero of the French Resistance, smuggling Jewish children across the border into Switzerland with the Nazis in pursuit? This fact-based World War II story is the core of Resistance, starring Jesse Eisenberg as Marcel Mangel …
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Even when a new Pixar movie isn’t up to, well, Pixar’s regular high standards, there is still animated magic to be had. That’s the case with Onward, a sweet-silly-slapdash tale about two pointy-earred elves: shy, introverted, teenaged Ian Lightfoot (voiced by Spider-Man Tom Holland) and his blustering, bumbling older brother …
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Attention, moviegoers searching for the worst movie of the year: We have a late-breaking winner. Cats slips in right under the radar and easily scores as the bottom of the 2019 barrel — and arguably of the decade. Even Michael Bay’s trash trilogy of soul-destroying Transformers movies can’t hold a …
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Want to see a master class in acting? Watch Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins show how it’s done in The Two Popes, a fiercely moving and surprisingly funny provocation that pivots on speculative conversations between the German John Ratzinger, a.k.a. Pope Benedict XVI (Hopkins), and Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio …
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Miles “Pudge” Halter (Charlie Plummer), the teen hero of Hulu’s Looking for Alaska, is obsessed with famous last words, like poet François Rabelais’ declaration, “I go to seek a Great Perhaps.” But as he confesses to his new friends at an elite Alabama boarding school, he’s never actually read the …
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When histories are written about the rise of the Streaming Wars and the dawn of Peak TV, Transparent will be a prominent part of the tale. It was Amazon’s first significant original series, the first streaming show to win major awards (for Jeffrey Tambor’s performance in the title role, as …
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Official Secrets is not kinetic cinema. Instead, it dumps a ton of data on audiences in telling the true story of Katharine Gun (Keira Knightley), the British whistleblower who leaked classified documents meant to pressure the U.N. Security Council into supporting the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. But even when …
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