The title of the wonderful new OWN drama David Makes Man is slightly misleading. Yes, it’s about a 14-year-old boy named David (Akili McDowell) struggling to become a man faster than he should have to, due to the complicated circumstances of his life. But David is just one of several …
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It’s as if a half century of progress in racial and gender politics never happened. That’s Shaft for you. In Ride Along director Tim Story’s updated, shamelessly regressive take on the “black private dick who’s a sex machine to all chicks,” three generations of Shafts take center stage. Jessie T. …
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Dark Phoenix doesn’t just suck big time. It’s the worst movie ever in the X-Men series. That’s 12 films since the first X-Men in 2000. Even series low points — that’s you X-Men Apocalypse — offered compensations. Dark Phoenix just lies there like a dying fish, futilely flapping about on …
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When Armistead Maupin began writing Tales of the City —his serialized, sudsy stories about life in San Francisco in the late Seventies —the central character was a very naive, very straight Midwestern girl, Mary Ann Singleton. Mary Ann served as a point-of-entry figure for readers unversed in queer fiction, just …
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Midway through the new season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, the eponymous heroine, Fifties Jewish housewife-turned-comedian Miriam “Midge” Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan) tells her manager Susie (Alex Borstein) that she’ll be spending the summer with her family at a resort in the Catskills. Susie is aghast about losing two months’ worth …
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Paul Greengrass can direct the hell out of action movies (see the last three Bourne films), but it’s his docudramas that that hit with gut punch force, starting with the troubles in Northern Ireland in 2002’s Bloody Sunday and moving onto 2006’s United 93, about the hijacked flight that crashed …
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Why doesn’t this movie show astronaut Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) planting the American flag on the moon? That was the question nagging away at folks in Venice after the premiere of First Man, Damien Chazelle’s bluntly visceral and deeply empathetic look at the Apollo 11 mission that culminated on July …
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The twisted magic of the original Conjuring movie seems awfully distant these days, doesn’t it? In James Wan’s 2013 horror hit about a big blue collar family being tormented by an ancient demon, old-fashioned jump scares and a relentless sense of dread mixed expertly with a deeply human story; the …
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Music fandom among males is a specialty of author Nick Hornby (see: the vinyl nerds, on page and screen, of High Fidelity), and the British writer continues his probe into the pathology of rock obsession with Juliet, Naked. The fan in question is Duncan (Chris O’Dowd), an academic who teaches …
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Looking for something fun to take mom to for Mother’s Day? Do your Mom (and yourself) a favor and steer clear of Life of the Party. Melissa McCarthy is comedy royalty – it’s a scientific fact, look it up – but even the Bridesmaids star can’t keep this mom-goes-to-college fluffball …
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