TV amp; Movies Reviews

We may as well get this out of the way now: Ben Platt is 28 years old. He was 23 when he originated the lead role of Dear Evan Hansen on Broadway, after playing the anxious, socially awkward high school student in out-of-town and Off-Broadway runs. Platt would eventually win …

When someone says “it’s a Sundance movie,” you probably know what they mean: the sort of small, sometimes scrappy movies that helped turn Robert Redford’s film fest out in Utah into both a welcome alternative to big-studio tentpoles (now more than ever!) and a kingmaking institution. It’s a catch-all term, …

We have missed you, Val Kilmer. Oh, we still go back to his old movies, where he continues to fly ice-cold (no mistakes) in an F-14, keep all his Pacific Tech University dorm room’s filth in alphabetical order, trade machine-gun fire with the LAPD while rocking a trim gray suit, …

“Your name is Estella,” her mother says. “Not Cruella.” Not yet, anyway. Disney’s Cruella, headlined by Emma Stone, is named for its would-be villain rather than for the 90-something Dalmatian puppies she’s tried to dognap in the name of fashion, time and again, over the years. The original Cruella would …

In George Clooney’s Midnight Sky, now streaming on Netflix, a cataclysmic event has happened on Earth, and a scientist named Augustine Lofthouse (played by Clooney) has decided — contra the rest of the event’s survivors, who go into hiding somewhere — to wait it out alone. That’s in part because …

Kaley Cuoco was 16 when she was cast as John Ritter’s oldest child in the ABC sitcom 8 Simple Rules for Dating my Teenage Daughter. She’d been acting since she was little (here she is as a young Claire Danes in a My So-Called Life flashback) and had already developed …

You’ve probably seen John Belushi‘s screen test for Saturday Night Live. It’s been floating around the internet for a while and shows up on the occasional SNL original-cast docs. Part of the four-minute clip opens R.J. Cutler’s Belushi, his portrait of the comedian premiering on Showtime (starting November 22nd). By …

So it’s about … does the plot matter? It’s Borat. And the full title of this sequel, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, does sort of say it all. It’s been 14 years since Borat Sagdiyev (Sacha Baron …

Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7, which is now streaming on Netflix, has the benefit of good timing. The movie, as is clear from its title, is taking on the notorious legal battle waged against the so-called “Chicago Seven,” a disjointed crew of anti-Vietnam War activists and counterculturalists …

Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz’s Antebellum begins where you can rightly expect a film with a title this brash to begin: on a plantation. This is the kind of movie that makes a point of throwing its audience, to say nothing of its characters, into the deep end. And so, …