Eye in the Sky
Gavin Hood's new movie sets the benchmark for depictions of drone warfare in film. Helen Mirren, Aaron Paul, Alan Rickman, and Barkhad Abdi star in this global tragicomic dance of uncertainty, fear, and godlike power.
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Rolling Papers
On January 1, 2014, Colorado became the first state in the nation to make recreational marijuana sales the law of the land. No longer were people required to go through the motions of obtaining bogus prescriptions for medicinal marijuana. Now, healthy people can just walk into a store and buy pot simply because they want […]
Requiem for the American Dream
Filmed over four years, the new documentary Requiem for the American Dream is the final, definitive long-form presentation of Noam Chomsky’s ideas on the interplay of power, capitalism, and democracy. Chomsky, arguably the foremost public intellectual of modern times, has been critiquing power and promoting democracy and solidarity for more than five decades in countless […]
James White
While some may balk at the arrival of yet another indie film delving into the angst of a twentysomething New York writer who broods and self-destructs, James White, the debut from writer-director Josh Mond, takes a slightly different tack that sets it apart.
It stars Christopher Abbott of Girls fame. On that TV show, he was […]
Where to Invade Next
After decades of documentaries criticizing the puzzlements of the American way of life—opposition to gun control despite a decades-long mass murder crisis (Bowling for Columbine), abiding lust for capitalism despite catastrophic results for the vast majority (Capitalism: A Love Story), opposing free public healthcare as a basic right comparable to free public education (Sicko)—Michael Moore […]
Stinking Heaven
A foul, jarring, but effective little film, Stinking Heaven shoves our faces into the very toe jam of addicts struggling to achieve sobriety. Set in the 1990s and shot on some sort of Betamaxy videotape to give it that authentic, grimy ’90s feel, the film depicts daily life in a suburban New Jersey commune catering […]
The Pearl Button
It’s hard to imagine a more fascinating place on earth than Chile. If we had to pick one country to show an alien race what varying geographical features our planet has to offer, it would probably be that country. It has more than 4,000 kilometers of coastline and the highest volcano and part of the […]
Bridge of Spies
It recently came out that the story of James B. Donovan, a Brooklyn lawyer who negotiated the release of American spy plane pilot Gary Francis Powers from the Soviet Union in 1960, was almost made into a 1965 movie starring Gregory Peck as Donovan. That would have made perfect sense—the role is about as morally […]
Experimenter
Writer, producer, and director Michael Almereyda is one of the more exciting filmmakers working today. He is interested in serious, intellectual themes, adapting Shakespeare in Cymbeline earlier this year or dramatizing the life and work of famed social scientist Stanley Milgram in his latest film, Experimenter. Yet Almereyda is not so much paying homage […]