Film, TV & Streaming

A light and cheery appraisal of a somber subject, Vanessa Gould’s documentary Obit focuses on the writers and editors assigned to the necrology desk of The New York Times. Like other chronicles of dead-tree media made in the past decade — The September Issue, R.J. Cutler’s Vogue ode (2009); Andrew…

If nothing else, Alien: Covenant is the most ambitious Alien film ever made. It’s almost as if Ridley Scott, foiled in his recent attempts at biblical epics, metaphysical dramas and thorny psychosexual thrillers, decided to revisit those genres under cover of a prized franchise sequel. That’s not to suggest that…

Despite my fondness for Quentin Tarantino, I’ve never been a Reservoir Dogs fan. Back in 1992, the writer-director’s feature debut seemed to me little more than a clever and grotesquely violent one-act play, gussied up with structural whimsy. Yes, the opening scene — black-suited crooks bantering about Madonna and the…

“I am garbage,” Amy Schumer’s Emily Middleton, on a vacation in Ecuador with her ma, Linda (Goldie Hawn), that’s gone all wrong, chimes in agreement with someone who’s leveled the insult at her — and who’s also holding the two women for ransom — in Snatched. Your enjoyment of this…

King Arthur is neither Guy Ritchie’s worst film nor his best, but it might well be his most frustrating. A compendium of all the things that make the British director so occasionally exciting and so often irritating, this new, hyper-stylized take on the Arthurian legends veers between genius and idiocy…

There was never any doubt about the thoughtfulness with which Aziz Ansari, in the first season of his Netflix series, Master of None, addressed the kinds of societal divides — racial, cultural, generational, sexual — that most sitcoms either lack the vision to perceive at all or take on only…

Michael Mann’s 1995 masterpiece, Heat, comes out this week in a brand-new, fully loaded and beautiful Blu-ray edition. To explore further what makes this epochal crime drama so special, I recently talked to the director. The story of Heat was based on real-life personalities. There was real thief named Neil…

I Love Dick, the epistolary novel, is an obsessive confessional story from a woman — a version of the author Chris Kraus — who, in her letters, lusts for an English art critic named Dick. He barely returns the affection. Yet … she persists. The story is almost like a…

The true heart of Michael Mann’s Heat is revealed a little more than an hour into the film. No, I’m not talking about the classic coffee conversation between Robert De Niro’s master thief, Neil McCauley, and Al Pacino’s obsessed LAPD cop, Vincent Hanna — that fantastic and immortal face-off comes…

A sleepy earnestness both ennobles and afflicts Ricardo de Montreuil’s fathers-and-sons story, Lowriders. At first the film plays as a low-key corrective, a Hollywood drama with name producers (Brian Grazer, Jason Blum) that, outside a couple of tutorial info-dumps covering cultural basics, presents East Los Angeles lives like pretty much…

Stéphane Brizé’s The Measure of a Man, from 2015, showed us a modern factory worker’s soiling experience of the post-industrial economy. Now A Woman’s Life begins on the Normandy coast in the middle of the 19th century but is no less concerned with francs and debts, with how lives get…

America is going to hate this movie. Doug Liman’s The Wall — whose title will forever demand that, when bringing up the film in conversation, you’ll have to say, “No, the other Wall” — is a mean little thriller set in our desert wars, and its only American soldiers are…

Choosing the greatest films shot in Miami seems like a straightforward undertaking. Simply look for the most popular movies that include some of the Magic City’s most iconic locations, right? But not all films set in Miami were actually made here. More than one James Bond movie was set in the 305, including Thunderball, whose plot called for blowing up the city.

It’s May, and we’re all still standing! Thank you, television! I was gonna add that May is looking up, but then I noticed there’s a three-hour long Carpool Karaoke special, so instead I’ll just say that May has some growing up to do, and leave it at that. Let us…

John Waters’ response to boxes — the kind in which we tend to place others and ourselves — is to vomit on them. And then sell them, his pencil-thin mustache twisting in a good-humored smirk. Throughout his career as a director, writer, artist, road tripper, provocateur, etc., Waters has been…

Steve Coogan is at a fancy dinner, but he’s not doing any Michael Caine impressions. Instead, he’s brooding with resentment of his workaholic congressman brother, Stan (Richard Gere), and grappling with the realization that his son might be a psychopath. It’s all supposed to be harrowing, and the British comedian…

Luther Campbell, Miami New Times columnist and hip-hop godfather, has inked a deal with Lionsgate to star in a biopic based on his memoir, The Book of Luke, which chronicles his rise from inner-city party DJ to rap superstar and owner of an influential independent record label.

For the past half-century, college campuses have served as a primary theater of the culture wars. So it’s fitting that one of the year’s most provocative, timely, searching, intellectually prickly, and ultimately satisfying series takes place at a university. Netflix’s Dear White People, which raids the 2014 film of the…

However you look at Julian Assange — radical hero, martyr, Trumpist sell-out, probable rapist, victim of his cult of personality — there’s something in Laura Poitras’ documentary Risk to confirm your point of view. You might not think there would be much left to say on this subject, particularly after…

It’s May! April showers have made way for a flowerbed of classic films this month. Now that summer vacation is on the horizon, it’s time to check out some great old movies on the big screen between all of those beach runs. A cool, dark theater is actually the best place to be when you have a sunburn.