TV amp; Movies Reviews

Elijah Bynum’s Magazine Dreams is both too much and not enough. At its center is a role for which star Jonathan Majors has said that he “ate 6,100 calories a day for about four months” to prepare — work that needed to pay off to convince us of its central …

If “Physician, heal thyself” wasn’t a cliché at the time Jesus said it, it almost certainly was shortly afterward. (Even Jesus described the phrase as a proverb.) The notion of a doctor being unable to tend to his own maladies is such a fundamental form of dramatic irony, professional variations …

Michael J. Fox traces his ground-zero moment to waking up after a bender in 1990 in a house in Florida. He awakes in a state that, well…to call it “hungover” would be too kind. He can barely remember what he did the evening before — all he knows is that …

Sex has always ruled the genre long ago mislabeled “reality TV.” It’s present whenever you start the cameras rolling on a group of people, whether at their place of work or in a well-appointed villa with unlimited booze. Even a survivalist show like Naked and Afraid, which drops contestants in …

Florian Zeller’s The Father, released in 2020, attempted to understand an octogenarian man’s dementia from a first-person perspective, allowing the confusing mix of memory and present-tense, of people and places, to become the story. The Son, Zeller’s new movie, was similarly adapted from a work that the filmmaker and playwright …

Alice Diop’s Saint Omer is a movie about a trial. But it is not strictly concerned with the question of innocence or guilt as a problem of the law. Far more complex, the movie finds, is the problem of how we should feel about the moral authority of the question …

Give Kevin Williamson credit: The screenwriter behind the Scream series isn’t afraid to recycle his greatest hits. His new addition to the slasher-film canon opens on a young man named Tyler (Joel Courtney) wandering the aisles of a cleaned-out supermarket. It’s April 3rd, 2020. Covid-19 cases are exponentially rising. Most …

Good evening, this is your captain speaking. Welcome to Trailblazer Flight 119, departing Singapore for Tokyo. If you’re wondering why tonight’s flight is not particularly full, it’s because we’re traveling on New Year’s Eve. (And if you’re wondering why a not-particularly-full theater is programming what feels like a relic from …

Among the many compliments I can give HBO’s The Last of Us is that it eventually made me forget that it’s based on a video game. This isn’t a knock on video games, but on the very different, conflicting natures of gaming versus watching film or television. One is interactive, …

The cardinal rule of bedtime is simple: Don’t look under the bed. Everybody knows this. Amoebas know this. Yet Kaylee, one of the two young kids in Kyle Edward Ball’s low-budget Canadian horror flick Skinamarink, does it anyway. Worse, she does so after a voice in the dark instructs her …