“Why are you so extreme with everything, man?” Ramy’s friend Ahmed asks him. “Everything with you, dude. You’re, like, the most emotional, extreme Muslim I’ve ever met.” This is the important thing to understand about Ramy, the superb Hulu dramedy returning this week for its second season. It’s not just …
Read More »
Yoav (Tom Mercier) is speed-walking down the rainy streets of Paris, past cafes and cars and people reading newspapers; he’s moving so fast that the camera can barely keep up with him. Once he finds the apartment he’s going to crash in —and the key to the front door under …
Read More »
Netflix‘s Criminal is, depending on how you want to look at it, either one big, bold experiment or four smaller experiments. A police procedural where every episode takes place only inside an interview room and its immediate surroundings, it is Bottle Episode: The Series — only with an international component …
Read More »
Jim Jarmusch’s comic deadpan seems ideally suited to the zombie genre. So who better than this indie hipster, who’s been an avatar of cool from Stranger Than Paradise to Paterson, to take a stroll with the walking dead? Having tackled vampires in high style with 2013’s Only Lovers Left Alive, …
Read More »
There was the 1,000 watt smile, the sort of giant grin that could light up a room, or an auditorium, or the Metropolitan Opera House. There was the bulky physique, which made an already larger-than-life figure that much larger, yet somehow not intimidating; if anything, it helped turn him into …
Read More »
It starts as an irresistible riff on Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, with Andrew Garfield standing in for Elliott Gould as an Angeleno stoner and Peeping Tom-turned-amateur-detective named Sam. It ends … well, we’re still not sure where this movie ends, exactly. In this wannabe spellbinder from writer-director David Robert …
Read More »
When we first meet the main characters of FX’s new limited series Fosse/Verdon, stage and screen director-choreographer Bob Fosse (Sam Rockwell) assumes such control over his wife, the dancer Gwen Verdon (Michelle Williams), that he moves her body into the position he wants. She tries it his way, then moments …
Read More »
If you want to know what James Cameron has been up to since he achieved worldwide box-office dominance with Avatar 10 years ago — besides tinkering away on a bunch of Avatar sequels we still don’t have release dates for — you may want to check out Alita: Battle Angel. …
Read More »
In the third season of HBO’s True Detective, Mahershala Ali plays Arkansas state cop Wayne Hays, investigating the same child murder case across three eras: as a hotshot detective in 1980 whose troubled service in Vietnam is close in the past; as a family man looking to resurrect his career …
Read More »
Brady Corbet’s knockout of a second feature (following 2015’s The Childhood of a Leader, about the growing pains of a fascist tyrant) damn near explodes off the screen. Yes, a movie about the traumatic childhood that formed a formidable pop diva might be too much for some people. But this …
Read More »