Scared about our political future? Boys State, the punchiest documentary so far this year, offers flashes of hope. And who will lead us out of bondage, you ask? Teen boys — 1,100 of them; their average age is 17 — who have gathered for an annual leadership conference run by …
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“I had a murder habit, and it was bad,” Michelle McNamara says early in the new HBO documentary series I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. “I would feed it for the rest of my life.” Like many things McNamara said or wrote, these words prove sadly prophetic. An acclaimed true …
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What’s wrong with a rowdy raunchfest to raise your spirits in a shutdown world? Nothing really, except everything is stupefyingly wrong with Coffee and Kareem, a DOA, dysfunctional family farce with an overeager cast — led by Ed Helms, Taraji P. Henson, and Betty Gilpin — who strain so hard …
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As filmmaking, The Last Full Measure stumbles under the bumpy pacing and deck-stacking of writer-director Todd Robinson (Phantom). But the film gets up and pushes forward owing to Robinson’s passion to get this true story told. The subject is William Pitsenbarger (Jeremy Irvine), a U.S. Air Force pararescue jumper (also …
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(This review contains no real spoilers for El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie. A more detailed and spoiler-filled take on the film is coming tomorrow morning at 9.) Writing the adventuresof Walter White and Jesse Pinkman required at least as much improvisation as the criminal escapades themselves entailed. Neither the …
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There was a glorious moment in television about five years ago, when it seemed like the medium was on the verge of another evolutionary breakthrough. Shows like American Horror Story, True Detective and Fargo suggested the birth of a new form, the anthology miniseries. It would neatly split the advantages …
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Nicole Kidman strips away every trace of star glamour to play Erin Bell, an LAPD detective and boozy burnout trying to close the books on the cold case that ruined her life 17 years ago. The star and director Karyn Kusama (Girlfight, Jennifer’s Body) take no shortcuts to the dark …
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The title character of HBO‘s My Brilliant Friend is Lila Cerullo, a shoemaker’s daughter in a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples in the Fifties. Defying all odds of both nature and nurture, she is a prodigy who masters whatever task she sets her mind to, usually without any …
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Melissa McCarthy is a lock for a Best Actress Oscar nomination for Can You Ever Forgive Me?, the true story of Lee Israel, a lonely, embittered author of celebrity biographies who took up forgery to pay the bills when her jobs dried up. The Academy previously rewarded McCarthy with a …
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With the debut of Amazon’s Jack Ryan, John Krasinski will be the fifth actor to play the title character, a CIA analyst introduced in a series of best-selling Eighties novels by Tom Clancy(*). Krasinski follows Alec Baldwin in The Hunt For Red October, Harrison Ford in Patriot Games and A …
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