Since his breakout sketches on “Saturday Night Live,” Julio Torres has established himself as a surrealistic comic. He graduated from the show to co-creating and starring in the quirky horror comedy series “Los Espookys” as the deadpan blue-haired diva Andrés and the solo special “My Favorite Shapes by Julio Torres,” which true to its title, […]
Few things are as alarming in modern day American television as dialogue-heavy screenplays fully loaded with insults, jokes, withering monologues that say nothing at all. If characters were properly fleshed out, their words would reveal their backstories, inner workings, motivations; but when they’re written as flatly as those on HBO’s newest limited series, “The Regime,”
A feature length debut, Molly Manning Walker’s “How to Have Sex” is a blisteringly real survey of female coming of age. Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), Em (Enva Lewis), and Skye (Lara Peake) are three teen best friends who go on holiday to Crete for what is meant to be the best girls’ trip summer can offer.
I’m not really sure how genre fans will respond to “Amelia’s Children,” a Portuguese horror comedy about a suspicious wife, her clueless husband, and his creepy family. “Amelia’s Children” is funny, but the jokes are usually on its characters and their Freudian anxieties. It’s the quasi-gothic scenario that’s amusing here, and it’s as fraught as
Watching “Outlaw Posse,” you get the sense that writer-director Mario Van Peebles was asked to create a list of his favorite Westerns and then adapted that list into a screenplay. Throughout the film, there are any number of homages (and even the occasional outright lift) to such favorites of the genre as “The Wild Bunch,”
There’s a wonderful scene in Texas filmmaker Richard Linklater’s sprightly comic docudrama “Bernie,” about a murder in the town of Carthage, Texas, where a man in a diner explains that Texas is actually five states, then pithily summarizes each one. A version of that sensibility animates series “God Save Texas,” now on Max. Inspired by
A broken system validates itself in “Article 20,” a Chinese New Year legal thriller that also happens to be a domestic farce and, oh yeah, the latest movie directed by mainland hitmaker Zhang Yimou. Only a filmmaker as hawkish, conflicted, and masterful as Zhang (“Hero,” “Full River Red”) could have sutured together the malformed parts
Society often ignores those living on its fringes. Thankfully, there are cinematic works like Henry Nelson’s sensitive and perceptive feature debut “Asleep in My Palm” to delicately give them their due visibility. Patiently paced despite running at a compact 89 minutes and full of observant details inside the off-the-grid lives of a father and daughter,
Writer-director Noora Niasari’s debut feature, “Shayda,” is a personal meta-fiction based on her own childhood, marked by a fraught parental dynamic and endless uncertainty, but also fierce, unshakeable motherly love. “Shayda”’s titular character (played by Zar Amir Ebrahimi) has escaped her abusive husband in Iran and fled to safety in Melbourne with her young daughter,
The shots are unreal. We fly behind and next to a bee in the jungle. We see lust on a young bonobo’s face. We watch lions and hyenas fight over a carcass in the middle of the night. National Geographic’s “Queens” delivers the nature documentary goods, and while watching it, I couldn’t stop wondering how
