Seek out the nearest jumbo screen and let filmmaker James Gray, a renegade visionary with a big reach and a knack for sneaky mischief, sweep you off ad astra (that’s “to the stars” in Latin). Getting lost in the space conjured up by the writer-director and the brilliant Dutch-Swedish cinematographer …
Read More »'Hobbs & Shaw': 'Fast & Furious' Spinoff Brings Surreal Silliness
Whatever this is, it’s not a movie — it’s a product more deserving of a road test than a review. Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw is the ninth chapter in the Fast & Furious series (the gross is over $5 billion across the previous eight films) and its …
Read More »'Shangri-La' Review: The Art of Zen Record Producing According to Rick Rubin
“It’s not about me at all,” says Rick Rubin — renowned record producer, hip-hop pioneer, possessor of one of the world’s truly magnificent celebrity beards — at the very beginning of Shangri-La, Showtime’s four-part docuseries that premieres tonight and is … well, ostensibly about him. He’s talking to the project’s …
Read More »'Warrior' Review: A Bruce Lee Vision Brought to Vivid Life
Among the more fascinating legends in the short but memorable life of Bruce Lee is the TV show the martial-arts icon pitched in the early Seventies about a Chinese immigrant traveling through America in the late-19th Century. The studio politely declined, the Lee family story goes, then stole key elements …
Read More »'Apollo 11' Review: Immersive Doc on Moon Landing Is a Masterpiece
It is easy to think that there’s nothing left to be said, and even less to be seen, about the flight that took place on July 16th, 1969 — one that took three men hundreds of thousands of miles away from earth and let two of them step foot on …
Read More »'Mapplethorpe' Biopic Fails to Capture the Complex Portrait He Deserves
Robert Mapplethorpe shot flowers, children, celebs (Warhol, Capote, the young Arnold Schwarzenegger) and himself in high-contrast black-and-white that commanded attention. But what made him infamous and iconic were his portraits of nudes, often reduced to body parts (a hand, a torso, a black penis enveloped in white hands) and often …
Read More »'Mary Queen of Scots' Review: Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie's Royal Rivalry
Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie earn all the bows and curtsies coming their way for breathing feminist fire into Mary Queen of Scots, a 16th-century drama that messes just enough with recorded fact to avoid being dismissed as textbook-stuffy. In the year of the radically raunchy and irreverent The Favourite, …
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