When a stranger at a party asks the title character of HBO’s new comedic miniseries Mrs. Fletcher what she does, she replies, “I watch a lot of porn.” She’s not joking. Eve Fletcher (a wolfishly perfect Kathryn Hahn) has a day job working at a senior center, but the moment …
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To the list of great books mangled by Hollywood — F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, and, OMG, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged — add Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. This cinematic assault on Tartt’s 2014 Pulitzer prize-winning novel would seem to have everything going …
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“You have a fearsome energy,” Krystal Stubbs is told midway through On Becoming a God in Central Florida, Showtime’s new comedy about American dreams and delusions. It’s meant as shameless flattery, but it’s also an accurate description of both Krystal and the superb performance that Kirsten Dunst provides in the …
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It was going to save Moraine, Ohio — that was the plan. The small town outside of Dayton had revolved around a General Motors plant the way a planet orbits around a sun. Then the factory closed two days before Christmas in 2008, the community took a major hit and …
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A summer movie, a natural disaster, a strong young woman in peril, a toothsome underwater predator or two — whaddaya need, a road map? In the grand tradition of Jaws homages, Alexandre Aja’s survivalist horror flick pits us vulnerable humans against Mother Nature’s little chompers — in this case, massive …
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All you need for a movie, Jean-Luc Godard famously declared, is a gun and a girl. His fellow French filmmaker Luc Besson has taken the maxim to heart, albeit with a few upgrades. You could also throw in a knife or two, for example. If the “girl” — a grown …
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Carla Gugino’s first job as a TV series regular was playing Michael J. Fox’s reporter girlfriend Ashley on Spin City in 1996. It was a big break that instead broke bad: The show’s creators quickly realized Ashley was a distraction from the funnier workplace scenes, and Gugino was let go …
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There’s a long, absolutely delightful history of demented robots and dangerously self-aware A.I. in science fiction, and for a while, it’s hard to tell where I Am Mother‘s title character belongs in the Bad ‘Bot pantheon. It’s tough to pinpoint why, exactly, you don’t trust Mother, an angular android with …
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(This review was based on watching the entire second season of Cobra Kai, and may contain spoilers.) As Eighties movie sequels go, The Karate Kid Part II wasn’t half-bad. It lacked the surprise and joy of Daniel LaRusso and Mr. Miyagi’s first adventure together. But in taking their act on …
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The woman walks out of the cabin, the wind whipping all around her. Her white dress is bloodied. She’s carrying a baby, which isn’t making a sound; the two men staring at her are equally silent. (We eventually hear a howl of pain coming from offscreen.) Later, we see her …
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