The 2016 Doctor Who Christmas Special.
Grandma’s death brings successful New York banker Peter (Jesse Wakeman) back to Warwick, Rhode Island and the despised childhood home he couldn’t wait to blow. Having lost his wallet somewhere in transit, there’s no one to turn to but former best friend and once favorite target of Peter’s bullying, Donald …
Ferguson, Missouri, the day after an unarmed African-American teenager was fatally shot by a white police officer. A call asking for a bigger police presence to help assuage any potential unrest results in the appearance of an MRAP, a veritable armored car, given to the city free of charge as …
Documentary on the life and work of Swiss-born photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank, who reinvented himself the American way with his book of photography The Americans and filmmaking efforts with The Beats and the Rolling Stones. Directed by Frank's long-time editor Laura Israel, featuring music by Lou Reed, The White …
Panic Room meets Wait Until Dark in this pitiless, uncommonly serviceable horror thriller. A pair of necessitous, romantically involved housebreakers (Jane Levy and Daniel Zovatto) partner with a college freshman (Dylan Minnette) whose dad’s position with a home-security provider helps to open a lot of doors. What could be easier …
This film plays as part of the San Diego Latino Film Festival. According to the festival brochure, "Tall, dark, androgynously handsome, Pierre wears eyeliner and a black lace g-string, and has sex with both boys and girls. Things get only more complicated when the teenager’s single, working-class mom is arrested …
For a group of entertainers whose job it is to make people laugh, there sure are a lot of cutthroat assholes working the comedy circuit. The vacant seats that open Don’t Think Twice are reserved for a six-person improv troupe whose numbers dwindle like Agatha Christie’s “Indians” as the top-floaters …
Out for revenge, seamstress-turned-sleuth Kate WInslet returns to her rural Australian hometown and, using haute couture much the same way Sherlock Holmes would apply deductive reasoning, cracks a decades old crime that positioned her as a murderess. Thankfully, this was a lot darker than anticipated. For over half its running …
The Acquisitions, Inc. gang plays D&D in front of a gaming convention audience, and you get to watch!
How can Lloyd Stanton and Paul Toogood’s documentary meditation on stand-up comedians, which features a murderer’s row of talent — Jerry Seinfeld, Sarah Silverman, Gary Shandling, Jerry Lewis, Chris Rock, Amy Schumer, Kevin Hart, et. al. — be almost entirely unfunny, and more than a little dull? It starts with …
Documentarian Otto Bell’s titular huntress — a 13-year-old Kazakh named Aisholpan who hails from a family boasting generations of champion (male) eagle hunters — is impossible not to like and/or root for. She’s cheerful, natural, diligent, sweet, and full of dreams about following in her father’s footsteps. So Dad consults …
Avant-garde rocker Frank Zappa was on The Steve Allen Show in 1963. That was over 50 years ago. Now he’s got a Kickstarted documentary and a Twitter feed to boot. We should all be so lucky (and mustachioed).
A fairy tale based on the true story of Eddie Edwards, a bespectacled, milk-swilling loser who sets out to win the 1988 Winter Olympics by refusing to let various unpleasant realities have any bearing on his pure, shatter-proof dream of simply competing in the Games. (A few samples: a naysaying …
Writer-director-producer Kelly Fremon Craig’s The Edge of Seventeen offers a verbally frank take on the horrors of adolescence — difficult parents, difficult siblings, difficult romantic interests, and even difficult best friends — gentled just enough to provide solid entertainment. (Especially if you liked John Hughes’ teen oeuvre.) An illustration: when …