Ever notice that it’s almost always a bad sign when an R-rated animated movie brags about being an R-rated animated movie? The one exception might be SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER AND UNCUT (1999), but other than that the pickings are slim. I had this realization watching Chris Prynoski’s NERDLAND, a very graphic animated comedy filled to the brim with boobs, boners, and buttholes. The first feature film by animation house Titmouse

Andrew Rossi’s new documentary THE FIRST MONDAY IN MAY is gorgeous, sumptuous. It’s also undercooked. The film follows the inception, creation, and opening gala for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2015 fashion exhibition “China: Through the Looking Glass.” The exhibit itself was a massive celebration and rumination on the tenuous relationship between Western fashion and Chinese culture curated by the renowned

Richard Linklater is uniquely qualified to make a film like EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!! By that, I mean he’s the fairly rare filmmaker who was a certifiable jock--both the quarterback and star pitcher for high school teams in Houston and Huntsville, Texas. A baseball scholarship helped pay for college. That perspective informs the athletes of his most famous film, DAZED AND CONFUSED (which, chances are, is probably playing on a cable

DEMOLITION is off from the first frame and never grounds itself enough to make a coherent argument. Hard to tell whether it’s Jake Gyllenhaal’s perplexed expression as he endeavors to show himself empty of emotions after the accidental death of his wife or the ill-thought storyline that appears to go in one direction and then unexplainably veers into another. Jean-Marc Vallée, who previously directed the excellent

MARGUERITE ET JULIEN, which comes out this week, had everyone talking before its premiere at the 2015 Cannes Festival--the story deals with incest, after all, a taboo subject which should probably always remain taboo. Adapted from an original screenplay written by Jean Gruault for none other than French new wave master François Truffaut, MARGUERITE ET JULIEN stars French actors Jérémie Elkaïm and Anaïs

The story of Olympics legend Jesse Owens has always stuck with me. Not because of the glory of winning four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin games, setting records in front of Adolf Hitler. It has stuck with me because it haunts me – that a man could be a national hero one day and then struggle in the longer RACE of life. RACE doesn’t cover much of Owens’ life outside of his athletic peak. Being a pretty lame inspirational

In Mark Cousins's STOCKHOLM MY LOVE Alva Achebe (Neneh Cherry) is a passionate Swedish architect who is fascinated by the way buildings can influence lives. And yet, she's haunted by an event from her past. A year earlier, Alva was involved in an accident, the weight of it still affecting her today. On the anniversary of the accident, she reaches breaking point. She gets lost in Stockholm,

People walk all over Jesus, partially because he can’t fight back, partially because he lets them. His best friend is a prostitute who shakes him down for money and hogs his measly apartment to service clients. People have an uncanny ability to not notice him when he walks in a room—unless they need him for something, of course. The gay, femmy son of a famous ex-boxer, Jesus makes ends meet turning the occasional trick and fixing the wigs of Havana transvestites

In his last film HOW STRANGE TO BE NAMED FEDERICO the great Italian director Ettore Scola recounts his decades-long friendship with Fellini, the undisputed master of cinema. But following the arc of that friendship, he also talks about himself and how at age fifteen, following in the footsteps of his elder (born in 1931, he was eleven years younger than Fellini) the future he saw for himself was as a caricaturist at the time with

The praise critics have showered on Todd Haynes’s CAROL gives me pause. Have I seen an entirely different film or is there something in this one that escapes me? A. O. Scott of the N.Y. Times sees CAROL as “fetishistically precise in its recreation of the look and sound of the past.” Sorry, but the fingernails with their bright red polish, the lips with their bright red lipstick, the precisely-coiffed heads, women wearing high heels