TV amp; Movies Reviews

A small-imprint–published slab of pulp fiction that became a huge literary sensation, Victor Headley’s 1992 novel Yardie drops readers into a London filled with ex-pat Jamaican kingpins, gang wars, alleyway assassinations and an antihero — “D.,” short for Dennis — who works his way up the underworld ladder. The writing …

In one episode of the endearingly peculiar and energetic new Starz comedy Now Apocalypse (Sunday nights at 9 p.m.), the show’s directionless hero Ulysses (Avan Jogia), has sex with a hot delivery guy, then asks if his life is some “never-ending porno.” The delivery guy suggests this was an anomaly …

Showtime is cooking up its own take on Roger Ailes, The Loudest Voice in the Room, starring Russell Crowe as the disgraced Fox News CEO and chairman who was brought down when at least 20 women, including network stars Gretchen Carlson and Megyn Kelly, called him out for sexual harassment. …

Margarethe von Trotta remembers the first time she saw it. It was the early Sixties, and this young German woman — still several years from establishing herself as an actor, and a little over a decade away before The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975) would induct her into the …

Deutschland 83 debuted on Sundance in 2015, right in the middle of the run of The Americans, a couple of months after the end of that show’s third season. The story of an East German soldier recruited to go undercover in the West German military, it functioned as a tense …

In TV, it’s called a “bottle episode”: a half-hour or hour of an ongoing series that corrals a cast into a single, usually closed-off location and forces the show’s creatives/creators to work within those parameters. The Guilty, Swedish filmmaker Gustav Möller’s feature debut, sticks to a somewhat similar limited set-up. …

Jonah Hill doesn’t appear in a single scene of Mid90s, but you can feel his presence in every scene of this comedy spiked with touching gravity. Making his directing debut with a script he wrote himself, Hill shapes this coming-of-age tale like a European art film (think Francois Truffaut’s 400 …

Here in the States, the populace worships the Kardashians. In the U.K., there’s nothing like a Dame. In a sane world, there’s no contest. So do have tea with the Dames: Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Eileen Atkins and Joan Plowright. Director Roger Michell (Notting Hill) has had the good sense …

Oakland-based rapper Boots Riley scores a knockout debut as a director with Sorry to Bother You, a no-mercy satire that gets up in your face, breaks all the rules – and then invents new rules so it can break them too. Did you expect any less from the leader of …

Confession: I’ll see anything with David Tennant in it. Bad Samaritan, however, barely qualifies as “anything.” Mostly, it’s a collection of spare suspense parts that someone ransacked at the movie dump and is trying to resell as fresh product. Good luck with that. As compensation, there’s Tennant, the Scottish actor …