Ira Sachs, the director of the acclaimed gay films Keep the Lights On and Love is Strange, is a subtle filmmaker. There’s nothing flashy in his shots or his dialogue, and he doesn’t push his actors to histrionics; his movies are naturalistic portrayals of real people struggling with family duty, class, aging and love. With…
Florence Foster Jenkins, who lived from 1868 to 1944, was an eccentric heiress who used her considerable financial resources to stage and promote her musical career. She needed to use her own money because, despite having as a child been somewhat of a piano-playing prodigy, she was a terrible singer, probably both tone and beat…
Aside from making a great deal of money, there was no reason to make another Jason Bourne movie. After three of them – The Bourne Identity, Supremacy, and Ultimatum – the amnesiac assassin that the CIA tried to get rid of has regained his memories and gotten revenge. Plenty of people were killed, cars were…
In the pantheon of TV series not about gay men that gay men tend to be obsessed with, Absolutely Fabulous is bigger than Designing Women and on a par with The Golden Girls. Almost obscenely popular in the U.K. (with ratings comparable to Cheers at its high point), Ab Fab has more of a cult…
also playing In one of the worst examples of modern panicky emasculation, small-minded men who spend their lives complaining on the Internet had a collective meltdown when it was announced that Ghostbusters would be remade with women playing the roles originated in 1984 by Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis and Ernie Hudson. For some…
As we were walking into Swiss Army Man, I discovered that my friend Adam, who I’d brought to the movie, didn’t know anything about what we were about to see. I giggled, because I knew that the movie was about a guy stranded on a deserted island who befriends a farting corpse. Adam was going…
Whether you admit it or not, whether you did it deliberately, you’ve watched some odd sexual stuff on the Internet. Because as the song goes, “The Internet is for porn.” Some fetish videos aren’t surprising, whether it’s feet or leather or women’s panties. But some are, or at least they’re surprising to most people. When…
The ads running for The Lobster have been using quotes from reviews describing the film as “hilariously frightening” and “wickedly funny” between quickly edited scenes, giving you the feeling that it’s a bit slapstick. I hate this kind of bait and switch sort of marketing. The movie is much, much more disturbing than it is…
Bryan Singer directed the first two movies based on Marvel Comics’ mutant superhero team the X-Men. Brett Ratner directed the third film, The Last Stand, which is loathed by fans and critics alike. The franchise was then rebooted with Matthew Vaughn’s First Class, and Bryan Singer returned for the second film in this cycle, Days…
In one of the first scenes of Luca Guadagnino’s fantastic A Bigger Splash, Marianne Lane (Tilda Swinton) and her lover Paul de Smedt (Matthias Schoenaerts) are relaxing on the rocky, sun-bleached beach of an Italian island in the Mediterranean. It seems idyllic; they’re beautiful, clearly in love, and the setting reeks of wealth. But then…
