There is no such thing as a casual Frank Zappa fan — it’s an all-or-nothing proposition. (Really, there’s no such thing as a casual Frank Zappa listener, period: You either immediately recoil from his grandiose, often goofy odes to dancin’ fools and yellow snow, self-promoting pimps and and S&M aficionados …
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It’s like a scene out of a nightmare: A singer is howling onstage as his band thrashes behind him. When the number is done, he notices something is on fire. That’s not part of the show, he says. The camera whips around, as if the person holding it is trying …
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They call him the Blissfield Butcher, a serial killer who terrorizes students every year around homecoming time. The annual high school event is a big deal in this small town, and the type of ghost-story fodder that kids use to scare one another with around campfires and late-night keggers. As …
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Here’s what Cuties, the debut feature from French-Senegalese filmmaker Maïmouna Doucouré, is: the story of an 11-year-old named Amy (Fathia Youssouf) who’s stuck watching her family fall apart and is trying to find a place for herself in the world. Here’s what it is not: a salacious bit of pedo-bait …
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A quick question: How much do you like Alien? Let’s rephrase this slightly: Do you dig Ridley Scott’s masterpiece so much that you’d be perfectly fine watching something that owes a massive debt to it, just to kill time between your 999th and 1000th viewing of the original 1979 groundbreaker? …
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There’s an indisputable emotional force at the core of this story about an estranged father (Liam Neeson) and son (Micheál Richardson) who travel together to Tuscany to sell a house that neither has seen since the car-crash death of the man’s wife. Made in Italy has nothing to do with …
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Atmosphere is everything in this ghost-less ghost story, in which a house is haunted not by a poltergeist, but the demon of dementia. It’s the kind of disease that afflicts one family member and digs its tentacles into those who try to manage it. Relic marks an auspicious debut for …
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There are many surprises contained withinAvenue 5, HBO‘s new sci-fi comedy about a space cruise to Saturn that goes awry. Some of these are good, and it would ruin many of the show’s jokes to reveal them here. But the biggest surprise is a disappointing one: that Veep creator Armando …
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In Seberg, Kristen Stewart gives a fully-inhabited, body-and-soul performance as a Hollywood casualty pushed beyond the limit. It’s such a stellar turn that she almost redeems this well-meaning but wobbly biopic — which earns points for trying to do her justice. Someone needed to. In playing Jean Seberg, Stewart embodies …
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This powerful new addition to what’s shaping up to be the year of Adam Driver casts the Marriage Story star in the all-work-no-play role of Daniel Jones, the real-life Senate investigator charged with filing a report on the CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on suspected terrorists after September 11th. …
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