I have no particular feelings one way or the other for the band Spandau Ballet, the subjects of the documentary Soul Boys of the Western World, which is why I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the film. Soul Boys is entertaining through its formal …Read more

In this age of conglomerated media, the figure of a newspaper baron, a person like Hearst who reshaped papers in his image, seems an antiquated notion, one that hasn’t existed since before WWII and the late rise of television news. But the documentar …Read more

“I’m a person just like you But I’ve got better things to do Than sit around and fuck my head Hang out with the living dead” – Straight Edge, Minor Threat (1980) These lyrics started what is now known as the straight edge movement. It all began with …Read more

Banksy Does New York, from director Chris Moukarbel, is not a film about Banksy. If you are looking for the answers to all of your burning questions about his (or her) private life, favorite meal, or biggest fear, keep looking. What this film is, is …Read more

Who is Dan Harmon? The answer you get will depend upon whom you ask, though each of Harmon’s acquaintances in the film lit up with eager anticipation to answer such a straightforward question.  John Oliver says that Dan is a “human hand grenade, with …Read more

As long as there are cameras there will be actresses, so seems to be the central idea behind Robert Greene’s terrific and often terrifying Actress, a docudrama about real life actress Brandy Burre, who once had a recurring role on HBO’s The Wire, and …Read more

Abraham Lincoln is undoubtedly one of the most important figures in American history, and as such, his life has been the center of countless pieces of popular culture. Somewhere past the Obama allegory of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln and John Ford’s ea …Read more

The truly wonderful thing about James Marsh’s The Theory of Everything is that, despite its title, it’s actually rather efficient at pinpointing exactly the one specific thing it wants to concentrate on in its subjects’ lives, and unlike most biopics …Read more

Interstellar takes place in a future where planet Earth has turned into a wasteland and people are on the brink of extinction, as one of the characters succinctly puts it, “the last people to starve will be the first to suffocate”. But somewhere in t …Read more

West is a film about a border crossing, but the crossing itself happens early in the film and is relatively uneventful. Rather, West addresses the psychological malaise that accompanies the transition, the lingering uncertainties and confusions that …Read more