Four tall, scruffy creatures amble through a storybook forest. They walk, they eat, they build shelter, and repeat. The group exchanges a wordless cacophony of grunts, screams, and whoops to communicate, but we are not privy to their conversations. Like a silent movie, we figure out the meaning of their language through movement, changes in […]
Ninety-one minutes, including seven for closing credits, isn’t enough for “Sting,” a modestly scaled horror caper that pits a flesh-eating spider against a handful of Brooklynites. A little more would likely have gone a long way, given how rushed and underdeveloped many characters and animal attack scenes are in this polished genre exercise. Granted, a
Documentaries about cultural hotspots are as common as the film festivals that play them. Seems if an establishment sticks around long enough, especially in a city like New York, a filmmaker will want to make a movie about its longevity. In a sense, it’s easy storytelling: If a restaurant has been around for decades, some
Veselka: The Rainbow on the Corner at the Center of the World (2024) Read More »
Director Wade Allain-Marcus’s “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead” is a remake of the 1991 original, repurposing an older narrative for a new generation and, this time around, centering on a Black family. Seventeen-year-old Tanya Crandell (Simone Joy Jones) looks forward to her summer in Spain with her friends. But when her mother (Patricia Williams)
“My relationship with food is complicated …very complicated. Because I have Type 1 diabetes,” says Larissa Zimberoff, author of the investigative book Technically Food: Inside Silicon Valley’s Mission to Change the Way We Eat and one of the many interview subjects in the documentary “Food, Inc. 2” a sequel to, you guessed it, 2008’s “Food,
You’d be hard-pressed to find a more worthy, time-tested miniseries about America’s founding than HBO’s “John Adams” a riveting, elegant chronicle of one of our nation’s most famed architects. It’s a subject writer Kirk Ellis can’t seem to get away from; here, in 2024, he, along with co-writer Howard Korder (“Boardwalk Empire”), zeroes in on
The unnamed narrator (Hoa Xuande) of “The Sympathizer” flees the fall of Saigon as a refugee and lands up in sunny Los Angeles in the late ‘70s. Like many immigrants in America, he suffers racist insults, works jobs he doesn’t particularly enjoy or want to do, and struggles to feel at home in a strange
Whatever you expect from an Alex Garland movie, he always gives you something else.”Civil War” is something else again. It premiered in the US hours before I published this and it’s already divisive. I look forward to reading all of the arguments for and against, even though both early raves and pans seem to be
There’s a lot of ground to cover in “It’s Only Life After All,” a documentary about the Indigo Girls. The duo (Amy Ray and Emily Saliers) have been performing together, after all, for 40 years. The phenomenon of the Indigo Girls is well worth exploring, but director Alexandria Bombach gets bogged down in the weeds,
The trailer for “Abigail” tells you almost everything you need to know about the movie, a wacky high-concept horror thriller about a group of kidnappers who bite off more than they can chew when they unwittingly abduct a child-sized vampire ballerina. The vamp, played with some relish by Alisha Weir, only really comes alive when
