In all seventy-six minutes of Benjamin Ree’s new documentary “Magnus” I’m not sure if I can remember ever seeing Magnus Carlsen, the world’s highest ranked chess player, ever smiling during a game. He smiles plenty when he wins, but that’s not the same. During the games his eyes scrunch up and his face tightens into a mask of marbled concentration. The happiest we ever see him is when he tears himself away from the obsession that

For a man who takes great pride in being a writer of crime fiction, architect Walter Stackhouse (Patrick Wilson) sure acts like a blithering idiot when he get embroiled in an actual murder investigation. It’s quite astonishing, really; he doesn’t do one thing right. When his mentally unbalanced and suicidal wife winds up dead beneath a rural overpass—the same overpass where another high-profile murder victim was recently discovered—he

Director Gerardo Chijona liberally name-drops a plethora of Hollywood films in “The Human Thing”: “3:10 to Yuma” (1957), “The Godfather Part 2” (1974), “Terminator 2” (1991), and even 'The Sopranos.' One would expect that with such a macho pedigree of visceral violence “The Human Thing” would be some kind of high-octane thriller or cinematic homage. But it’s neither. The film is one of words and literature centered on

I remember those nights of iodine streetlights and black-suited riot […]

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

I think it was the moment when Gilbert Gottfried showed […]

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