Fans of NBC’s late, great 30 Rock will want to check out the new Netflix series from Tina Fey and her creative partner, Robert Carlock. Like the earlier series, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt has a style of joke-writing that’s fast, loose and literate. It’s the kind of series you can simply enjoy on one level, and […]
Glenn McDonald
Posted inFilm & Television
Live-action Cinderella goes for old-fashioned Disney magic rather than revisionist flash
CINDERELLA Now playing Remember those old-fashioned hardcover fairytale books your grandma used to buy for your birthday, with the ornamental lettering and baroque illustrations? The ones you buried in your closet while you read Goosebumps and Mad Magazine? Disney’s new live-action update of CINDERELLA is the movie equivalent of those proper old tomes. Directed by […]
Posted inCulture
Movie review: An effective take on the consequences of life after death in The Lazarus Effect
The Lazarus Effect ★★★ 1/2Now playing The field of resuscitation medicine is a busy area of science these days. Researchers are exploring the relatively new idea that death is more of a process than an event, and that patients can potentially be brought back to life hours after vital organs stop functioning. That’s the jumping-off […]
Posted inCulture
The Queue: Jake Gyllenhaal gets his sociopath on in creepy thriller Nightcrawler
Nighttime in Los Angeles is a busy and sinister place in Nightcrawler, an unsettling thriller starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a freelance TV news cameraman. Gyllenhaal plays Lou Bloom, part of a ghoulish, nocturnal mutation of paparazzi—nightcrawlers—who follow cops and first responders to crime scenes and accidents. The movie makes many depressing observations about the media, […]
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The Queue: Binge-watch on the dark side with astonishing tech-horror series Black Mirror
When more than one person suggests that I get on board with a particular Netflix binge-watching opportunity, I try to pay attention and put it in the queue. Alan Partridge, say, or Patton Oswalt’s new special. When a dozen different people insist I watch something immediately—well, that’s when the magic usually happens. And so it […]
Posted inCulture
Movie review: The found-footage genre, teen romance and time travel collide in Project Almanac
Project Almanac★★ ½ Now playing I’m a sucker for good time-travel stories, in films and in books. Something about temporal paradoxes makes my brain itch in a totally pleasant way. So when a promising but ultimately underwhelming time-travel movie like Project Almanac comes along, I figure—eh, you take what you can get. From the studio […]
Posted inCulture
The Queue: Class conflict and Victorian grotesques—you know, for the kids—in The Boxtrolls
Watching the stop-motion animated film THE BOXTROLLS at home over the weekend, I went through three distinct phases of reaction: 1. Wow, this is different. 2. Wow, this is dark. 3. Wow, this is fucking amazing. I kept the f-bomb in my internal monologue—I was watching with the kids—but the rest I literally said out […]
Posted inCulture
Movie review: Chris Hemsworth is hard to swallow as a computer genius in Blackhat
Blackhat ★★ Now playing With surveillance concerns, security breaches and foreign hacker attacks tumbling though the news cycle pretty much constantly these days, it would seem that Michael Mann’s new thriller, Blackhat, is well-timed to reflect our cultural anxieties. And it would be, I suppose, if the movie were really about hackers. But despite the […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Unbroken should be required viewing for anyone who thinks torture is justified
UNBROKEN Opening Dec. 25 UNBROKEN, director Angelina Jolie’s adaptation of Laura Hillenbrand’s bestselling nonfiction chronicle, tells the true story of Olympic athlete Louie Zamperini, who endured an incredible series of traumas during World War II. After surviving for 47 days adrift on a raft in the Pacific, Zamperini suffered for two-and-a-half years in a brutal […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Into the Woods puts stage magic on the screen—but not always seamlessly
INTO THE WOODS Opening Dec. 25 Sometimes, if you shift gears, you can turn a perplexing movie into a pleasurable one. This is the case with INTO THE WOODS, Disney’s much-hyped adaptation of the beloved Stephen Sondheim musical, which happens to have recently finished a run at Playmakers. If you enter these woods looking for […]
