Who is Dexter: New Blood for? I ask this not to sound snarky or incredulous about the idea of doing a sequel series to Dexter, the beloved, and then reviled, drama starring Michael C. Hall as a serial-killer vigilante who only targets other murderers. We live in the age of …
Read More »'The French Dispatch' Is the Most Wes Anderson-y Wes Anderson Movie of All Time
They’ll tell you that Wes Anderson’s new movie, The French Dispatch, is a love letter to The New Yorker magazine. The charge sticks. This is a man who fell in love with The New Yorker in the 11th grade; who once bought a bound set of forty years’ worth of …
Read More »'Swan Song': Udo Kier Lives Out Loud, Even If This Movie Mumbles
Udo Kier is the kind of actor who defies notions of great screen acting as chameleonic or transformative: you don’t cast him in a role, you cast the role as Udo Kier, and let his curious, transfixing presence do the rest. Over a globe-trotting, seven-decade career that has cheerfully run …
Read More »'False Positive': A Breach-Birth Version of Pregnancy Horror
Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby is timeless. This is despite — but also, it’s uncomfortable to admit, because of — our collective reservations about its director. On the subjects of men and women and marriage and sexual violence and gaslighting and the terrifying vulnerabilities of bringing a child into the world, …
Read More »'Army of the Dead': As Satisfying as Fighting a Plague of Zombies Can Be These Days
“I always used the zombie as a character for satire or a political criticism,” said zombie maestro George Romero — a man asked to opine on zombie franchises more times than should have been legally allowable — in 2013. “And I find that missing in what’s happening now.” Now being …
Read More »'Violation' Is Latest Rape-Revenge Thriller That Seeks to Subvert the Genre
Violation — written, directed, and produced by ongoing collaborators Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli — is a rape-revenge thriller that’s adamant to upset the norms of the genre. Among those ostensible norms: the linear path from inciting assault to bloody revenge. It isn’t so much that the rules of rape-revenge …
Read More »Rosamund Pike's Smile Says It All in 'I Care a Lot'
There’s a genre of smile, that wide, gleaming, shit-stirring grin that says: I hate you. And also: I’m going to kill you. Can we call it the Pike? After Rosamund, of course, who serves it better than most anyone working in movies at the moment, and who has the added …
Read More »'One Night in Miami' Review: Imagining a Meeting of Black American Minds
It’s supposed to be a celebration. On a balmy night in Miami, in February 1964, four friends — Malcolm X, Cassius Clay, Jim Brown, and Sam Cooke — get together in a humble room at a black-friendly hotel, bypassing the environs of the nicer, whiter Fountainbleau nearby. The occasion: the …
Read More »'The War With Grandpa': What About Bob, The AARP Years
At this point in his career, Robert De Niro has nothing left to prove. If he were to retire tomorrow, the 77-year-old movie star would still have two Oscars, too many classic American movies on his resumé to count, a greatest-of-his-generation éminence grise status and a legion of pretenders to …
Read More »Poetic Drama 'Residue' Makes Gentrification Personal
At the center of Residue, writer-director Merawi Gerima’s debut feature, there’s a crisis born out of a familiar ritual: coming home. Jay (Obinna Nwachukwu) is a D.C. native who’s just returned home from college in Los Angeles. The experience is immediately rendered strange, right in front of his own doorstep. …
Read More »