Wait. Pixar finally has a quality animated film hitting theaters? Granted, it’s a sequel. But after seeing “Turning Red” pushed to Disney+ while a lukewarm film like “Lightyear” took its theatrical place, it’s taken far too many years for the studio to have a distinguished domestically released animated adventure. Even as a reintroduction to a […]
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One of my very favorite television genres is Jeff Daniels conducting business while chewing scenery. Whether playing a news anchor in “The Newsroom” or a detective in “American Rust,” he always carries himself with such studious charisma. David E. Kelley’s “A Man in Full” presents Daniels with a new challenge, tapping into his inner Colonel
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Netflix’s new comedic thriller “Bodkin” opens with the show’s protagonist, Gilbert Power (Will Forte), stating, “When I started this podcast, I didn’t expect to solve anything. I didn’t expect it to change my life.” It sets up the characters’ preoccupations well, and also exposes the main problem with the genre their fictional series is embedded
Brothers Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross straddle the lines of documentary v. fictional storytelling with their newest “Gasoline Rainbow.” Gathering five non-acting teens to embody the story’s central friend group, we are consistently unsure how much direction has been given to the group as we follow them on the road. The precarious nature of
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Jane Schoenbrun’s second narrative feature is a gnawing search for belonging in the static spaces between analog pixels. They stir dreamlike logic into scavenged memories, especially in a scene early in the film that grasps at how the medium of television’s celestial radiance can grant wide-eyed salvation in even the darkest room. A young Owen
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Jenna Marvin is a fearless 21-year-old queer artist in Russia. Using found objects, layers of makeup and tape, and a jaw-dropping amount of creativity, she manifests otherworldly outfits and strange creatures that seem to have fallen out of a sci-fi TV show and onto the streets of Moscow. Some of her outfits are fun and
Children take center stage but aren’t the real stars of “Ultraman: Rising,” a new animated superhero fantasy about absent parents, lost kids, and other Pixar-entrenched stock types. The movie follows (but predictably differs) from “Shin Ultraman,” the most recent high-profile project featuring the 58-year-old alien hero. “Shin Ultraman” was more of a retro-modern redo of
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“Ghostlight,” which focuses on a construction worker drawn into a production of “Romeo and Juliet,” is a drama about traumatized people healing themselves with art. It’s messy in the way that life is messy. It’s one of those movies that simultaneously feels too long and not long enough. But there’s a purity and earnestness to
Valérie Donzelli’s “Just the Two of Us” is reminiscent of the “women’s pictures” of the 1930s and ’40s, films like “Stella Dallas,” “Possessed,” “Kitty Foyle,” and “Letter from an Unknown Woman”. These were melodramas, told from the woman’s point of view, dealing with often tragic circumstances: exploitation, having children out of wedlock, man/money problems, and
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The Australian-born novelist and essayist Lily Brett is the daughter of Holocaust survivors and writes frequently on that topic and condition. Her 2001 novel Too Many Men is about a father and daughter who travel to Poland to explore the father’s tragic past. One of the book’s many features is a series of conversations the
