AMC‘s new drama Dark Winds, based on Tony Hillerman’s bestselling series of buddy-cop mystery novels set on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico, is not the first television attempt at the property. Twenty years ago, PBS made a trio of TV-movies adapted from Hillerman’s books, starring Wes Studi as veteran …
Read More »'Fire Island' Is Part LGBTQ+ Rom-Com, Part 'Pride & Prejudice' Among the Pines
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Noah (Joel Kim Booster) and his circle of friends, in possession of an amazing house on Fire Island, consider their annual week together in the New York summer hotspot to be something sacred. To be fair, it’s not their house per se — …
Read More »'Aline' Is a Biopic That's Not About Céline Dion, Nope, Not About Her at All
Let’s talk about love — and open secrets. Because both are at the heart of what makes Valérie Lemercier’s new film Aline such an oddity, if not quite the oddity that was promised. The New York Times, writing about the movie’s debut at Cannes last year, made Lemercier’s project out …
Read More »'Summer of Soul': A Legendary Long-Lost Concert, An Instantly Classic Concert Film
If you had walked up to Harlem‘s Mount Morris Park, on just about any given Sunday in the summer of 1969, you’d have run in to a crowd. There would be vendors selling food, kids running around, families grilling meat, folks lounging in the sun. You’d hear laughter, and chatter, …
Read More »'Here Today': Tiffany Haddish and Billy Crystal Are a Rude Duo, Not an Odd Couple
The doctor asks, “May I ask what your relationship is?” And Tiffany Haddish and Billy Crystal — whose roles in their new comedy Here Today are more fun to imagine if you pretend the actors are playing themselves, so we’ll keep calling them Tiffany Haddish and Billy Crystal — say, …
Read More »'The United States vs. Billie Holiday' Fails to Take Into Account the Life of the Woman We Still Love
It’s a movie called The United States Vs. Billie Holiday, so you know there must be a battle at stake. And there is. Lee Daniels’ new movie, which stars a charismatically downplayed Andra Day as the titular, completely singular, and in many ways unknowable Lady Day, is set primarily in …
Read More »'His House' Review: A Haunting, Out of the Past
Bol (Sope Dìrísù) and Rial (Wunmi Mosaku) are a young pair of asylum seekers fleeing the all-consuming violence of South Sudan by way of a dangerous and all-too-familiarly tragic voyage across the Mediterranean. We get glimpses of that violence at home, as well as the voyage toward ostensible security in …
Read More »'The Forty-Year-Old Version': An Auteurist-Comedy Star Is Born
Radha Blank, the writer, star, director, and central (fictionalized) character of The Forty-Year-Old Version, is — in the movie — a struggling playwright. She was once a rising star on the theater scene, one of those beknighted 30-Under-30 types whose precocious early displays of talent were supposed to lead to …
Read More »'The Boys in the Band': A Queer History Lesson With Plenty of Shade
The Boys in the Band — directed by Joe Mantello and produced by, among others, Ryan Murphy — isn’t always good, but it’s a good time. The project is a tough prospect, in some ways. The movie adapts Mart Crowley’s groundbreaking 1968 play, an Upper East Side drama whose characters …
Read More »'Corpus Christi' Review: There's a New Hot Priest in Town
If you were paying attention to this year’s Oscars‘ and its renamed Best International Film section — a category that could’ve easily been redubbed “Parasite, and Four Other Films Which Aren’t Parasite” — you might have spotted an outlier in the lineup. There was Bong Joon Ho’s juggernaut of a …
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