Azazel Jacobs’ likably odd French Exit is headlined by the sharpest Michelle Pfeiffer we’ve seen in years, in a role so handsomely form-fitted to her talent, style, and attitude, it’s as if the movie had been written with that distinctive curl of her mouth, that magnetic chill of hers directly …
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On the surface, the story and theoretical appeal of Netflix’s new drama Firefly Lane seem clear. It is a decades-spanning tale of female friendship, meant to inspire laughter and lunges for the tissue box in equal measure, as it follow two women who both envy and complete each other. And …
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In The Marksman, Liam Neeson plays Jim Hanson, a former Marine living in Naco, Arizona, within spitting distance of a border fence. This means that he can phone local authorities when he sees a new crew of “I.A.’s” making their way into the country, on the one hand, and offer …
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What is “soul”? Is it that feeling you get when you tap into the flow between emotion and expression, the spiritual and the physical? Is it something personal percolating within you, waiting to be unleashed? Is it the essence of humanity in a nutshell? Defining the concept is like aiming …
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When a filmmaker newly arrived to television perceives the medium as “movies, but longer,” it typically means they don’t know or care about how to structure individual episodes, or why that matters. (Though in some cases, as with Luca Guadgnino and We Are Who We Are, those who talk the …
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The new Netflix miniseries The Liberator is a World War II story about brave men who bond through that terrifying experience, and who say things like, “Fear is a reaction; courage is a decision.” It is similar, in all ways but two, to dozens and dozens of filmed tales set …
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For some, he will always be Pukey Nicholls, the troubled skinhead from Shane Meadows’ This Is England. For other equally early adopters across the pond, he’s James “Cookie Monster” Cook in the British teen show Skins. Maybe you discovered him in the intense prison drama Starred Up, standing toe to …
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When Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, writer David E. Kelley, and friends all came together to make the first season of Big Little Lies, it was a television event, and one where the quality lived up to the star power in front of and behind the camera. Little of what anyone …
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Going into any of Liam Neeson‘s middle-aged-man-is-tested action movies — there are now enough of them to constitute their own mini genre within his career — you may find yourself asking a few pre-viewing questions: What’s his profession, and which side of the law is it on? Does he have …
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“We don’t have such people here,” declares Ramzan Kadyrov, chuckling to himself. “We don’t have any gays.” The head of the Chechen Republic is talking to David Scott of the HBO show Real Sports, and his assertions were more or less echoed by Russian officials when they addressed the U.N. …
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