You do not need to have attended Yale, or indeed any Ivy League university in any East Coast state, to recognize the archetype that is Hank Gibson. He’s handsome, bearded, and young, though not nearly as young as the students who eagerly congregate around him, hanging on his every word. …
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You couldn’t accuse Jeffrey Manchester of being inconsiderate or impolite. Sure, the former member of the U.S. Army’s 82nd airborne division had fallen on hard times in terms of steady employment, and when you need to provide for your family, you do what you have to do. In Manchester’s case, …
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Before PlayStation became a household name, before Neo learned kung fu, before the internet ruined our lives and ChatGPT put the AI in “paranoia,” there was Tron, the 1982 Disney movie that answered the burning question: What if Jeff Bridges was trapped inside a first-generation video game? The crude CGI-animated …
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Let’s rephrase the question slightly: Is the idea of watching Cillian Murphy unravel in spectacular, actorly fashion worth navigating a lot of sound and fury signifying next to nothing? There are a few different movies jockeying for screen time in Steve, the British handwringer that drops on Netflix today, and …
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When he was 19 years old, still eons away from the essays, the novels, and the pseudonym that would grant him literary immortality, Eric Arthur Blair went east and joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. The country was still under British colonial rule — “an outpost of empire” — …
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With a title like The Smashing Machine, one might expect writer-director Benny Safdie’s first solo-directed feature to be a brutal, grinding sit. The film is based on the 2002 documentary of the same name about the life of Mark Kerr, one of the first American stars of mixed martial arts, …
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You hear him before you see him. First, there are a child’s drawings of soldiers and conflict, Irish flags and burning pubs and bodies separated from their limbs. Then a pastoral landscape appears, a portrait of nature that would be idyllic were it not for the ominous gray skies. A …
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Do not deny the star power of June Squibb. Resistance is futile. You may as well fistfight the tide. Even before she was nominated for an Oscar for her performance in Alexander Payne’s Nebraska (2002), the 95-year-old actor had been a go-to Everygrandma, doling out enough geriatric sass to make …
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Ever since he was a little boy, Cameron Cade wanted to be the quarterback of the San Antonio Saviors. He remembers him and his dad watching the Super Bowl back in the day, when their star quarterback, Isiah White (Marlon Wayans), led the team to a last-minute victory before sustaining …
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Ah yes, the late 1990s — back when whimsy was a form of currency, gorgeous people being weird meant instant cult-film-canon status (or even Oscar nominations), and you could make a movie about, say, two people going on a magical road trip involving random doors in fields and be part …
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