Amy Nicholson

Best of Enemies; Credit: Photo by Archie Lieberman

2015’s Most Essential Documentaries

Tear through 2015’s best nonfiction films and you’ll see the great range of the modern documentary: the straightforward brilliance of the political history Best of Enemies, the nail-biting battle footage of Cartel Land, the humanist wit of Finders Keepers, the quiet patience of The Look of Silence, the eerie animation......
With his new film

Quentin Tarantino Isn't Telling You What to Think

Here's a true story about a St. Louis murder that changed America. In 1837, a black freeman named Francis McIntosh stepped off a Mississippi riverboat and blundered into two white cops chasing a drunk sailor who'd called them names. They ordered McIntosh to stop the perp; when he refused, they......
Cillian Murphy

Ron Howard's Whale Flick Ain't Dick, But It Ain't Bad

Years after Moby-Dick was a flop, Herman Melville visited an old ship's captain named George Pollard. Both men had seen better days. In their youth, both had sailed the seas with some success. Melville had written novels about his adventures with island girls, and Pollard had once helmed one of......
Teyonah Parris in Spike Lee's Chi-Raq; Credit: Photo by Parrish Lewis

For Chi-Raq, His Best Film in Years, Spike Lee Looks to the Ancients

Oh Zeus, hear my lament that I was not present when Spike Lee imagined updating Lysistrata to present-day Chicago. I bet he burst himself cackling. Aristophanes' 411 B.C. comedy, written during the three-decade Peloponnesian War, concocts a crazy scheme: Women refuse sex until their blue-balled men give in and declare......
Eddie Redmayne as Lili Elbe

Eddie Redmayne Simplifies Womanhood in The Danish Girl

The Danish Girl, Tom Hooper's portrait of Jazz Age painters Gerda Wegener and her spouse, Einar, who butterflied into Lili Elbe via the first sexual-assignment surgery, is about gender and it isn't. Like its subject, it's fatally resolved to fit an ideal: the noble Oscar-bait biopic. If the script swapped......
Sylvester Stallone

Stallone Won't Let Creed Escape Rocky's Shadow

The heads of the City Dionysia, the Grecian playwriting competition that pitted Aeschylus against Sophocles and can be considered the original Oscars, had a rule: no original characters. Instead, the best creative minds of a generation — or really, a millennium — exhausted themselves finding new spins on, say, Medea......
There's a fois gras in there somewhere.; Credit: Amy Nicholson

Artful Farm-to-Table Comes to a Historic Space With Gardner Junction

On a weekend night at the two-month-old Gardner Junction in West Hollywood, young industry types buzzed around the steampunk-inspired bar talking loudly while, one imagines, silently wondering if they'd talked enough about work to justify putting the tab on the company card. The evening was brisk for an outdoor bar,......
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2; Credit: Photo by Murray Close

Jennifer Lawrence and The Hunger Games Transcend the Blockbuster

With the spectacular The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2, the best in the series, Jennifer Lawrence closes out the franchise that made her the biggest star of her generation. Since The Hunger Games started, in 2012, she's starred in four of them and only six of everything else. Luckily,......