TV amp; Movies Reviews

This review originally ran as part of our 2019 Toronto International Film Festival coverage. It starts with a ringing. Ruben, one half of the noise-rock duo and Decibel cover-story couple Blackgammon (think Lightning Bolt if fronted by a throat-shredded Diamanda Galas), is putting out merchandise, limbering up for a modest …

Maybe we should start with that subtitle: “America’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll Magazine.” [Clears throat at the volume of a jet engine.] Scott Crawford’s documentary on the estimable, invaluable 1970s music rag does stoop to mention another U.S. publication that was covering rock stars and the counterculture scene, one that …

The final season of Star Trek: The Next Generation features an episode called “Lower Decks,” told from the point of view of a group of junior officers on the Enterprise who see our heroes as their demanding and at times unfair bosses. It offered a fresh perspective on a show …

The characters in Aviva, writer-director Boaz Yakin’s experimental self-chronicle-meets-Carnal Knowledge update, have a lot of sex. They copulate passionately in suburban teenage bedrooms and expensive downtown lofts, furtively in the backrooms of bars and against nightclub walls, in versions both vanilla and 50-gray-shaded, positions both missionary and magnificently gymnastic, in …

The new 30 for 30 documentary Be Water opens up with a black-and-white screen test of its subject, martial arts legend Bruce Lee, from the mid-Sixties. Lee silently follows instructions to turn his head to different angles, before the off-screen director says, “Now the camera will pull back,” and invites …

Easter Cove is the sort of quaint port town that dots long stretches of the Northeastern seaboard’s coast, home to a community of fishermen and widows and maybe a drunken fuck-up or three. It’s the sort of small town that can seem cozy or claustrophobic; for Mary Beth Connolly (Homeland‘s …

If crimes against cinema merited prosecution, Blumhouse’s Fantasy Island would go directly to death row. It defies common sense why Blumhouse, the company that boasts Get Out, The Purge, and Paranormal Activity on its horror roster, would put its stamp on this pathetic imitation of scare cinema. The idea was …

Her name is Iya (Viktoria Miroshnichenko), but most folks call her “Beanpole.” It’s not hard to see why — tall, willowy, and blessed with hair the color of fine straw, this lanky Russian does indeed resemble a long, sprouting plant. But it’s a term people use affectionately when they talk …

There are as many sad parts of Apple TV+’s new immigration anthology series Little America as there are sweet ones. The eight stories contained in the first season feature children being separated from parents, dreams going astray, and scene after scene conveying the profound loneliness of being a stranger in …

The trick to creating successful screen farce is to make sure audiences don’t see you sweat. So it’s not a good sign that the actors are spritzing up a storm in Like a Boss. But what actors! The comic tornado known as Tiffany Haddish seizes the role of Mia Carter, …