When Jon Burroughs (Domhnall Gleeson) first sees Frank (Michael Fassbender), the lead singer of a ragtag little rock band for which he is randomly hired to play keyboards, his reaction is probably that of most of the audience watching the film Frank: What the hell? Here is a man with a giant, cartoonish fake head…
Maybe I’m a bit more emotional or sentimental than some, but when I watch people in the movies and on TV react to death, I’m astonished by the lack of, well, sorrow. Filmed funerals often seem to be settings for dramatic meetings of mourners, such as Jim Gordon and Bruce Wayne’s prophetic handshake at the…
The Skeleton Twins The best thing about getting past Labor Day is not, contrary to popular thought, the arrival of pumpkin spiced lattes at Starbucks, but rather the wide release of good movies to theaters. Of course, good movies do show up in the first nine months of the year, but movies like Boyhood, Locke,…
It should come as no surprise that movies based on true stories are much more “based on” than they are “true.” Few actual series of events unfold in a perfectly coherent and concise way, and even less fit into the three-act structure around almost all modern films are constructed. For many years, movies with queer…
Why Ira Sachs titled his latest film Love is Strange is unclear. Nothing about the love depicted in the film – between Ben and George, together for 39 years; between Elliot and Kate, together 19 years; between young lovers Ted and Roberto; between Eliot and Kate and their son Joey – is remotely weird. These…
Andrew is 13 years old and lives in rural Missouri, in a town an hour or so from Kansas City. He is a handsome kid, articulate and wise beyond his years. He’s also often cheerful, and I found this surprising and endearing. In Andrew Droz Palermo and Tracy Droz Tragos’ extraordinary documentary about three adolescent…
I cannot pretend to be an expert on Catholicism, let alone Irish Catholicism. My entire experience of the Catholic Church has been created by history classes I took more than 20 years ago, a few masses I attended out of curiosity and a large number of movies about priests and nuns, which run the gamut…
I must admit that the biggest reason I was so excited to see Guardians of the Galaxy was Chris Pratt. I’ve been a fan since he guested as trustafarian college student on The OC in 2006, and I developed a silly school boy crush on him in Parks & Recreation, on which he’s played adorable…
One of the problems Woody Allen faces when he is trying to defend himself against charges of pedophilia is how often the male protagonists in his films, usually well into middle age, pursue and win the affections of much, much younger women. Most notoriously, he cast himself, at age 42, as a man dating 17-year-old…
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes Few film franchises have been rebooted as successfully as Planet of the Apes. When Rise of the Planet of the Apes arrived in 2011, audiences were still smarting from Tim Burton’s bloated and boring remake of the eponymous 1969 film that started the series. No one had very…
