You do not fuck with Mads Mikkelsen. There are a number of takeaways to be had from The Promised Land, the excellent prestige drama-cum-bloody payback flick straight outta Denmark. The rich in 18th century Scandinavia were as entitled, immoral, and sociopathic as they are in 21st century everywhere. Just because …
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There are few movie-marketing gimmicks more enticing than the suggestion of a secret — a twist or revelation so shocking, so earth-shaking that it changes everything you thought you knew about a film, its characters, yadda yadda yadda. The audience’s curiosity is piqued, then they become co-conspirators: Once you know, …
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All Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce) wants to do is get to the coastal Greek town of Malia, get some quality time with her BFFs — Em (Enva Lewis) and Skye (Lara Peake) — and spend the next few days getting royally fucked up. This unholy trinity of 16-year-olds have just finished …
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It’s a running gag in the 12th season of Curb Your Enthusiasm that people keep mentioning that Larry David didn’t work on the last two seasons of Seinfeld, but then returned for the finale. Every time, Larry greets the observation with stony silence, because he knows the audience hated that …
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Tótem, Mexico‘s submission for this year’s Oscars, drops a bomb on you before the opening credits have even rolled. A mother, Lucia (Iazua Larios) and her daughter, Sol (Naíma Sentíes, luminescent), are goofing around in a public restroom. The seven-year-old girl is sitting on a toilet, unable — or maybe …
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On the night of April 3, 2015, Shiori Itō, an intern at Thomson Reuters, met Noriyuki Yamaguchi at a restaurant under the guise of a job interview. Yamaguchi, then the Washington bureau chief of Tokyo Broadcasting System and a personal friend (and biographer) of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, was a …
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In one episode of the new World War II epic Masters of the Air, a character collapses from exhaustion and sleeps through the events of D-Day, which were so memorably dramatized in Saving Private Ryan. In another, we realize that several characters are being held in the same POW camp …
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The double standard is almost as old as hip-hop itself. A decorated filmmaker gets laurels for his or her latest bullet-laden gangster movie. A rock or country star is proclaimed a songwriting genius for violent tales of man’s inhumanity to man. But rappers are held to a different standard, their …
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On Feb. 20, 1939, more than 20,000 yelling, cheering people packed New York City’s Madison Square Garden. They weren’t there for a basketball game or a concert. They were supporters of the German American Bund, a pro-Nazi organization that was ready for an alternative to democracy. They waved Swastika flags …
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Long before she transitioned, Harper Steele was a writer at Saturday Night Live. She was hired in 1995, the same week that a performer named Will Ferrell joined the cast. Unlike his fellow Groundlings Chris Kattan and Cheri Oteri, who’d also been recruited from the L.A.-based improv group to join …
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