Reviews
You People Review: Eddie Murphy and Jonah Hill Star in a Funny and Refreshing Update of a Familiar Tale
The new Netflix film, featuring Eddie Murphy and Jonah Hill, succeeds with its realistic portrayal of race issues — and killer jokes. You People Review: Eddie Murphy and Jonah Hill Star in a Funny and Refreshing Update of a Familiar Tale Paolo Ragusa
Sundance Review: The Hilarious and Authentic Theater Camp Takes Center Stage
This review is part of our coverage of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. The Pitch: “You need to know that only 3% of people make it. The rest end up in a mental facility — or a Go Go box in Hell’s Kitchen.” Welcome to AdirondACTS, a cozy, scrappy theater camp where such nuggets of wisdom are imparted upon young thespians. Over the course of the summer, we see the minutiae of theater camp play out in a mockumentary-style film, sharply directed by Nick Lieberman and Molly Gordon (both making their feature directorial debuts). First framed as a documentary following AdirondACTS founder Joan (Amy Sedaris), things begin to go awry when she falls into a coma — a result of “the first Bye Bye Birdie-related injury in the history of Passaic County” — leaving former campers, best friends, and devote...
Sundance Review: Jonathan Majors Is Here to Pump You Up and Bum You Out in Magazine Dreams
This review is part of our coverage of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. The Pitch: Killian Maddox (Jonathan Majors) wants one thing, and one thing only: To be remembered. Following in the footsteps of his idols (including one he writes to regularly, played by four-time Mr. Universe Michael O’Hearn), he’s committed himself to bodybuilding, shoving down 6,000 calories of chicken breast and pumping iron morning, noon, and night. He practices his poses in front of cameras, molds his physique to near perfection, rips through steroids like they’re Diet Cokes. He chugs protein shakes while watching porn, but doesn’t masturbate — whether that’s due to steroid-induced impotence or some unstated facets of his sexuality, we don’t yet know. He competes in amateur bodybuilding competitions, but ju...
That ’90s Show Review: A Sweet, Low-Stakes Revival of a Tried-and-True Formula
The Pitch: 17 years after the Formans shuttered their basement doors forever, a new era of revels, reefer, and joyrides is unfolding in Point Place, Wisconsin — this time on Netflix, rather than Fox. That ’90s Show follows Eric Forman (Topher Grace) and Donna Pinciotti (Laura Prepon)’s daughter, Leia Forman (Callie Haverda), as she spends the summer crashing with her grandparents, the inimitable Red and Kitty Forman (played by Kurtwood Smith and Debra Jo Rupp, respectively). Now in the era of grunge-influenced fashion, Alanis Morrissette, warehouse raves, and disposable cameras, That ’90s Show introduces a new era of fun-seeking basement dwellers: Ashton Kutcher’s Michael Kelso and Mila Kunis’ Jackie Burkhart are mostly out of the picture, but their son Jay Kelso (Mace Coronel) a...
Hunters Season 2 Review: An Uneven, But Never Boring, Conclusion to the Prime Video Series
The Pitch: If there’s one thing most of us can agree on, it’s that Nazis are bad. But what kind of justice does a Nazi deserve? That’s the ethical question underlying the second and final season of Hunters, the Jordan Peele-produced and very peculiar Prime Video thriller series about a ’70s-era vigilante force formed around one goal: track down all the Nazis who evaded persecution after World War II, and use the efficiency of bullets to stop them for good. Created by David Weil, Hunters is coming to a close after only 18 episodes, which somehow seems simultaneously like too many episodes and too few. But while suffering from writing issues and a lack of consistency in tone, there are moments of dialogue, performances, and in one case an entire episode which reveal the underlying potential ...
The Last of Us Review: HBO’s Video Game Adaptation Is Too Loyal to Its Source Material
The Pitch: The video game adaptation remains an albatross around the neck of many a film and TV producer. For every Silent Hill, there’s a dozen or so Wing Commanders; TV’s no different, even as recently as last year’s weaksauce Halo series for Paramount+. But HBO hopes to break the mold with The Last of Us, their prestige-drama take on the acclaimed Naughty Dog game of the same name. If you’ve played that game, or its divisive sequel (or watched The Walking Dead or any other zombie media over the past few decades), the premise is pretty familiar: The world has been ravaged by a deadly plague that kills millions and turns them into flesh-eating monsters (covered in mutated Cordyceps fungus), and the desperate survivors scramble to stay alive and maintain their huma...
M3GAN Will Dance and Slash Her Way Into Your Horror-Loving Heart: Review
The Pitch: Gemma (Allison Williams) works as a roboticist at a toy company, Funki, that churns out monstrous-looking hybrid versions of every kid’s ultimate companion –– a Furby, Tamagotchi, and Neopet all rolled into one. But while Gemma’s job revolves around the needs of children, she’s unfortunately ill-equipped to take in her recently orphaned nine-year-old niece, Cady (Violet McGraw), whose parents died in a tragic car accident. Feeling overwhelmed with the responsibility of having to care for a young, grieving child while feverishly trying to meet work deadlines for her demanding boss (Ronny Chieng), who expects a new toy prototype imminently, Gemma decides to kill two birds with one stone. What if she perfects her latest AI-powered invention, M3GAN (Model 3 Generative Android)...
Paul T. Goldman Is Hard to Describe, Impossible to Forget, and One Wild Ride: Review
The Pitch: “In 2012, a man named Paul T. Goldman tweeted at me,” is how director Jason Woliner (Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, Nathan for You) begins a note to the press about his new Peacock series. “He said that he had an incredible story to tell and had written a book – and a screenplay – about it. He asked for my help bringing it to the screen.” Ten years later, Woliner has done exactly that — though the form this story has taken probably wasn’t what Paul T. Goldman anticipated. Instead, the series is less a shocking tale of sex and crime and more a fascinating portrait of a man and his ambitions: his desire for fame, for revenge, or maybe just being seen. And seen he is, through a lens that is alternately dark, strange, bizarre, and, more often than not, very funny. Pieces of a Man: In t...
Whitney Houston Comes to Life (At Least On Stage) In I Wanna Dance With Somebody: Review
The Pitch: In 2012, America lost its Voice — Whitney Houston, the once-in-a-generation pop music icon, tragically died at the too-young age of 48. She was on the verge of a comeback after a stint in rehab, haunted by the twin specters of drugs and expectation; that we never got to see that beautiful second act makes her passing all the more tragic. In the meantime, we’ve got the songs and story Whitney left behind, and Kasi Lemmons’ I Wanna Dance with Somebody (or, as Sony’s SEO-focused title change goes, Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody) tries to stuff that into a two-and-a-half-hour speedrun of her life and career, featuring Naomi Ackie as the tragic figure. We see her early days as a gospel singer, groomed for greatness by her ambitious mother Cissy (a perfectly-balance...
The Recruit Review: Netflix’s Spy Thriller Asks Too Much of Noah Centineo
The Pitch: Owen Hendricks (Noah Centineo) is a fresh-faced, 24-year-old lawyer at the CIA’s Office of the General Counsel, and though he’s only been there for a couple of weeks, he finds himself way in over his head, beginning with an investigation into an already chaotic “graymail” attempt on the CIA. by Maxine Meladze (Laura Haddock). A former asset and CIA spy who was stationed in her native Belarus, Meladze is imprisoned in Arizona when Hendricks takes her case, and she threatens to reveal incriminating evidence against the CIA unless Hendricks can get her out of prison and back home to Europe. It’s a lot to ask for the relatively inexperienced Hendricks, who claims to have a passion for law but frequently finds himself jumping straight into the deep end, navigating murderous mobsters,...
Damien Chazelle’s Babylon Proves He Loves and Hates the Art of Cinema: Review
The Pitch: It’s 1926, and the movie business is a-boomin’. If you’re on top, you ride along with big-time movie producers to glittery bacchanals out in the California desert, uninhibited orgies stuffed with ticker tape, booze, cocaine, and elephants trudging through the masses of people. If you’re not, well, you sneak in anyway and hope for your big shot. It’s at one of these parties that we meet six figures who represent the end of one era and the beginning of another: Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), a silent film star whose shine is wearing off after decades in the biz; Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), a hard-partying Jersey girl desperate to make it in the pictures; and Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a hustling assistant climbing the ladder one ludicrous favor at a time. There’s also Elinor St....
Emo’s Not Dead Cruise Proves It Wasn’t Just a Phase: Recap, Photos and Video
With the onslaught of reunion tours and themed festivals that have popped up since the pandemic has simmered down (but let’s be honest, has it?), it only seemed right to throw in a scene fest amongst the jam bandy, stadium rock gatherings we’ve been seeing. There was When We Were Young, its own little toe dip into devotion of an era when Hot Topic was still kind of cool, but why see burned CD classics on land? How 2019 of us. Thankfully, scene king Matt Cutshall took his “emo’s not dead” bit to the shallow seas (we sail) with a freaking cruise… and it was awesome. The inaugural Emo’s Not Dead Cruise was a bit of curveball. Emos and water? Here’s where you’d insert a joke about turning the ocean black with our tears. Yet, something about it just… worked. From acoustic sets to bands playing ...
