TV amp; Movies Reviews

One of the most important things to happen in Persuasion, Carrie Cracknell’s new Netflix adaptation of Jane Austen’s final novel, has already gone down by the time the movie starts. Anne Elliot (Dakota Johnson) had once been in love — and in the enviable position to do something about it. …

“Notoriously shy” is one of the first phrases used to describe Courtney Barnett in Anonymous Club, Danny Cohen’s documentary-cum-tour-diary, and if you only knew this Australian singer-songwriter from her live shows, the words might come as a low-voltage shock. Sensitive, sure. But shy? Onstage, Barnett has a knack for demonstrating …

If the movies have taught us anything, it’s that there’s always a booming market for assassins — and should you be a government-sanctioned executioner, you’ll eventually use your deadly skill set against the very folks who’ve trained you. (That, and don’t feed creatures purchased from a Chinatown antique store after …

The big-screen treatment of a bestseller, a well-scrubbed Southern Gothic, a next-gen star’s showcase, a romance-murder-mystery-courtroom-drama-dessert-topping-floor-wax, The Movie That Would Be The Notebook — these are some of the ways to describe Where the Crawdads Sing, the adaptation of Delia Shannon’s book-club staple about love and death among the marshlands. …

In “Finding Frances,” the instant-classic series finale of his Comedy Central show Nathan For You, Nathan Fielder attempts to help Bill, an old man who had appeared on an earlier episode, track down a long-lost love. At one point, Fielder hires an actress to role-play as Frances, to help Bill …

She is petite, trim, almost birdlike. He’s big, slightly lumbering, closer to a bear. Her hair is short, kept in a shaggy pixie cut. His resembles an unruly, curly mop — a Chia pet in full sprout. Both of them have very large ears. No one can remember exactly how …

Go back and rewatch that first Thor movie if you haven’t seen it in a while. You might have forgotten how self-serious it is. Sure, you’ve got Tom Hiddleston’s trickster-bro Loki, and Thor eating enough pancakes to give a rhino a cardiac arrest, and our man throwing a mug on …

Vintage songs are regularly remade, sampled and, most recently, interpolated into new ones. But even in that context, the saga of Leonard Cohen‘s “Hallelujah” remains singular. A song that was initially rejected and ignored by the music business in the Eighties has, over the last two or three decades, become …

It’s been a while since I felt beaten up by a movie. Leave it to Baz Luhrmann to end that lucky streak. And with a movie about Elvis Presley, no less — hardly a subject to approach casually. Elvis, in the epic tradition of all of Luhrmann’s work, is a …

What serial killer worth his weight in dismembered corpses would be happy with a moniker as uncreative and flatly descriptive as “the Grabber?” That’s the name either a lazy detective or a reporter on deadline has bestowed upon the 1970s child-murdering villain Ethan Hawke plays in The Black Phone, a …