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Tag: film

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Barren and Dangerous
October 24, 2016
In the thriller du jour The Girl on the Train, a kind of Rashômon for the bridge-and-tunnel crowd, three female perspectives compete for our attention and sympathy. At its core, Rachel (Emily Blunt) enacts her onscreen alcoholism via smudged eye makeup and artfully blurred ...

The Ho-Hum Squad
August 09, 2016
Some time in April 2015, Jared Leto sent someone to throw a dead pig on a table during the rehearsals for Suicide Squad. Those who were present at the time recount their shock and fear beholding the scene, their worry that they might be working with someone who was genuinely ...

The Joys of Consumption
July 03, 2015
In the 1970s, when the New Deal consensus began to erode, something unexpected started to play a role in popular culture. It was the decade after the industry-approved release of The Pawnbroker (1964), the first Hollywood film to show women’s bare breasts, and all the old ...

Spoof Vs. Spy
June 12, 2015
Summer 2015’s first big blockbuster comedy, Spy, may traffic in elaborate onscreen subterfuge, but it’s little more than the latest variation on a baby-simple, well-worn Hollywood formula.The movie’s admittedly energetic and amusing aim is to lampoon and critique the ...

The Fantastic Four Under Fire
May 29, 2015
Only in America can the skin color of someone who spends much of his waking life on fire supply the basis for a spirited pop-culture controversy. That’s the grim lesson of the media run-up to the latest in the long line of lumbering comics franchises’ superhero cash-cows ...

Nights of the Living Dread
May 01, 2015
This week, the luridly misleading media coverage of the Baltimore uprisings called to mind a fittingly grim narrative template from the entertainment world: shlocky action-horror fare. The strange alchemy by which reportage of Freddie Gray’s murder at the hands of six ...

An American Marriage, Revisited
April 24, 2015
Limited Partnership, a new documentary about one of the nation’s first gay couples to be lawfully married, begins with a scene you might find in a legal thriller: an establishing shot of gray-slate courthouse columns gives way to a scrum of reporters positioned nearby. ...

Propaganda, Power, and Porn in Fifty Shades
February 17, 2015
I may get kicked off the Internet for saying this. But, when you look at it from the right angle, the Fifty Shades of Grey movie is a feminist victory. Throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, the idea of “porn for women” was a huge and often painful feminist debate. Porn was said ...

The True Cost of “Hollywood South”
February 13, 2015
It only took Louisiana eleven years and $1 billion to buy the title it’s always wanted—“Hollywood South,” the movie-making capital of the world. In 2013, it surpassed the film industry’s old standbys, California and Canada, by having eighteen major-studio releases shot ...

The Well-Trod Path: Nick Kristof at Home
February 12, 2015
Having liberated the “better half” of the developing world from gender-based oppression and poverty, the New York Times’s fave do-gooder Nicholas Kristof and his trusty investment-banker sidekick Sheryl WuDunn have set their sights closer to home. Folks on the war-torn ...

American Sniper and the Trope of the Sheepdog
January 26, 2015
The invasion of Iraq resulted in hundreds of thousands—perhaps even a million—people losing their lives. How can one attempt to justify so much killing? Enter Clint Eastwood’s new film American Sniper. Early in the movie, Chris Kyle’s father breaks life down for his ...

Wes Anderson’s Class Acts
January 20, 2015
I don’t know a single person who’s really satisfied with this year’s Oscar nominations. The most exciting movies of the year are almost unilaterally shut out. The slate of nominated directors is, with the exception of Birdman director Alejandro González Iñárritu, ...