Earlier this fall, HBO’s remake of Scenes From a Marriage began most episodes with an odd structural device, in which we watched actors Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac, as themselves, moving through the Scenes stages and getting into character before the opening scene began. It was a distracting creative choice …
Read More »'Halloween Kills'…Your Desire to See Any More 'Halloween' Movies
Do you remember the rush of seeing Halloween? No, not John Carpenter’s 1978 original, the Rosetta stone of modern horror and greatest man-meets-knife film ever. (And for the record, we don’t mean Rob Zombie’s 2007 love-letter-slash-living-wax-museum-exhibit to Carpenter’s slashsterpiece, either.) We’re talking about David Gorden Green’s 2018 version, which reset …
Read More »'Schmigadoon!': Musical Parody Miniseries Brings That Old Song and Dance Back to Life
“You know how much I hate musicals. People don’t just burst into song in real life,” complains Josh (Keegan-Michael Key) to girlfriend Melissa (Cecily Strong) early in the new Apple TV+ miniseries Schmigadoon!. At the moment, Josh thinks they’ve just stumbled into a weird tourist trap filled with performers aping …
Read More »'Summer of 85' Review: A Sunny Gay Romance With a Dash of Despair
François Ozon’s Summer of ‘85 — which adapts the YA novel Dance on My Grave, by Aidan Chambers — is moving but contained affair, aflush with overwhelming feeling but also distant from that feeling, probing but not always revealing, sensuous and charismatic but not always easy to like. It’s a …
Read More »'In the Heights' Sets Out to Do the Impossible — And Largely Succeeds
Paciencia y fe. Patience and faith. It’s what Abuela Claudia — in so many ways the emotional center of In the Heights, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s sun-splashed ode to the immigrant dream — preaches again and again, wearing it on her face, in her bones, even when she’s not saying it aloud. …
Read More »'The Underground Railroad': Barry Jenkins' Gorgeous Journey Into American Darkness
Again and again throughout Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Underground Railroad, the Oscar-winning Moonlight director will pause the story to present a tableau of his huge cast of black characters. These shots are stunning in their composition, as if Jenkins and cinematographer James Laxton are …
Read More »'Jupiter's Legacy': The Never-ending Story of Imitation Superheroes
In the opening scene of Netflix’s new superhero drama Jupiter’s Legacy, three kids run around a backyard playing superhero — a familiar moment given a twist when we see that one of them has actual superpowers. Then the subject of their role-play, the iconic Utopian (Josh Duhamel), who happens to …
Read More »'Bad Trip': Eric Andre, Tiffany Haddish and Lil Rel Howery Prank America
It makes a certain kind of sense that Bad Trip, Eric André’s entry into the Gonzo Comedy Hall of Fame (see: Jackass, Borat, Bad Grandpa), starts in Florida. Not that the other 49 states of this fine U.S. of A. don’t have their share of goofballs, chowderheads, numbskulls, fuck-ups and …
Read More »'It's a Sin' Mourns the Loss and Celebrates the Lives of AIDS Victims
Late in It’s a Sin, HBO Max‘s limited series looking at the dawn of the AIDS crisis through the eyes of a group of young Londoners, a character lies on his deathbed, recalling with a smile all the parties he threw and men he slept with before he got sick. …
Read More »'WandaVision': Marvel Studios Bows Down to the Heroes of the Small Screen
Read Sepinwall’s Premiere Recap of the First Two Episodes The Disney+ superhero series WandaVision opens with something brand-new to TV shows based on Marvel Comics characters: the Marvel Studios fanfare and logo, complete with glimpses of Iron Man and other figures from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which was previously only …
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