Ana Lily Amirpour’s Bad Batch Offers a Timely, Inventive Apocalypse

Ana Lily Amirpour’s comic post-apocalyptic action-drama offers little explanation of what exactly its “bad batch” is, or how the members of its motley, unfortunate tribe of humans wound up banished to a desert wasteland. Instead, Amirpour lets her camera linger on a sign warning that everything beyond a 10-foot-high metal…

All Eyez on Me Is an Incredible Achievement

Everything you know about Tupac is likely wrong. Casual fans think of him as a loyal left coast soldier in hip-hop’s East Coast/West Coast war, but he actually had tremendous love and admiration for New York, where he was born and largely raised. Others cite his 1994 Manhattan shooting as…

Emmanuelle Devos Makes the So-So Thriller Moka Worth Watching

Though it’s a phlegmatic, sometimes stumbling thriller, Moka, directed and co-written by Frédéric Mermoud, still has its share of gripping suspense. These tense moments arise not from any plot machinations but from the anticipation of the next exquisitely calibrated response by Emmanuelle Devos, the film’s star, who appears in every…

A Holy Terror Rages Against Modernity in Russia’s Bracing The Student

In Kirill Serebrennikov’s tightly wound symbolic drama, a Russian high schooler starts spouting off biblical verses at the teachers, administrators and teens around him, decrying the hypocrisy of their ways and of a fallen world. You can feel the allegory coming from a mile away, but that doesn’t mean you…

Friends (and This Cast) Deserve Better Than the Sour Rough Night

At least Rough Night, Lucia Aniello’s dutifully raucous new bachelorette-party comedy, achieves verisimilitude. It’s a rough watch and an evening killer, this film about friends who seem not to love, like or even really know one another. If you enjoy strained fun with people who have grown apart from you,…

Rough Night Director Lucia Aniello on Finding the Light Heart of Darkness

Lucia Aniello’s ensemble comedy Rough Night might look, from its marketing, like a gender-flipped Very Bad Things. Both comedies feature a pre-wedding party that goes off the  rails when a stripper accidentally gets killed by the rowdiest member of the crew. But Aniello’s film — which stars Scarlett Johansson, Zoë…

Seriously, the Third Cars Movie Finishes in First Place

Here’s something I never guessed I would say: It might be worth going into the new Cars movie spoiler-free. Without giving anything away, I can tell you that, at its climax, this latest installment in a springtime of sequels the world doesn’t need eases into a surprising new gear and…

Salma Hayek Commandeers Beatriz at Dinner‘s Nimble Class Comedy

A film often smartly attuned to language, Beatriz at Dinner — a sober comedy about class clash and soft-to-hard racism directed by Miguel Arteta and written by Mike White — operates in several different idioms. English and Spanish (sometimes unsubtitled) are spoken, as are the lexicons of healing and affluence…

Miami Resident to Show Off Amazing Memory Talents on Fox’s Superhuman

Last year, Cuban-born Miami resident Yusnier Viera represented the 305 on Fox’s Superhuman, a contest show that lets ordinary people with extraordinary skills test their abilities against one another for the chance to win a massive cash prize. This year, Miami resident Nelson Dellis will take the Superhuman stage to compete against a new crop of supertalented contestants. There must be something in the South Florida water.

Every Florida Contestant on The Bachelorette Ranked

What makes Floridians so perfect for reality TV? Out of the initial 31 suitors vying to win over Rachel Lindsay’s heart on the current season of The Bachelorette, a lucky number seven have connections to the Sunshine State. And they’re not all whackjobs, either. All of them made it past…

In a Sprawling New Season, Orange Is the New Black Betrays Itself

Since last November, we’ve been asked to understand, if not necessarily sympathize with, the furious resentments of the racists, misogynists, homophobes and plutocrats who have brought us to this point of political calamity. The fifth season of Orange Is the New Black (Netflix) appears to be its own kind of…