Danny King

Lakeith Stanfield stars as Colin Warner

Crown Heights Tells a Compelling True Story With Jarring Impatience

In adapting for the screen the long, hard story of Colin Warner — a Trinidadian native who, as a Brooklyn teenager in 1980, was wrongfully convicted of murder and sent to prison for more than 20 years — Matt Ruskin’s Crown Heights moves along in a counterproductive hurry. Scenes rich......
John Ford at war; Credit: Courtesy of Netflix.

Five Came Back Illuminates the Art and Fate of Great Directors in WWII

Unpromisingly, Five Came Back, a series that surveys the military service of Frank Capra, John Ford, John Huston, George Stevens and William Wyler — who cut off their Hollywood careers to serve in the Second World War and were thereafter irrevocably changed both in profession and in life — opens......
Credit: Courtesy of RLJ Entertainment

Paul Schrader's Dog Eat Dog Never Transcends Pulp Nihilism

Edward Bunker’s novel Dog Eat Dog (1996) kicks off with a disgusting sequence in which a two-bit criminal named Gerald “Mad Dog” McCain — caught up in a cocaine binge that Bunker describes in beat-by-beat detail across several pages — stabs his girlfriend and her daughter to death in a......
Credit: Courtesy of A24

Andrea Arnold's American Honey Spins Its Wheels on the Fruited Plain

In American Honey, her 162-minute fourth feature (and the first she's made in the U.S.), the British director Andrea Arnold sets an infatuation-at-first-sight encounter to Rihanna’s “We Found Love,” a conversation about dreams to Bruce Springsteen singing “Dream Baby Dream” and a moment of camaraderie among itinerant youngsters traveling across......
"Do you like movies about gladiators?"; Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros.

Eastwood's Sully Continues the Director's Interrogation of American Heroism

Like American Sniper (2014), Clint Eastwood’s Sully is a movie of nightmares. In Sniper, Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) sits rigidly in the living room, imagining the gunfire, roaring helicopters and wailing bystanders of Fallujah playing out on a turned-off television as his children race through the house. In Sully, Chesley......