by Matt Levine

​Continuing the tradition of sublime ridiculousness established by sketch-comedy classics such as The State and Mr. Show, Key & Peele provided some of the best comedy on television from 2012 to 2015. Even when the show’s ideas fell flat (an inevitability for any show that whips up so much content from week to week), it was enlivened by the presence of its stars and creators: tall, lanky, often-manic Keegan-Michael Key, who can be laugh-out-loud funny simply with the tone of his voice; and droll, stocky Jordan Peele, a master of straight-faced absurdity. Whether the show was embracing its love for the truly ludicrous, tackling controversial subjects, or lampooning elements of black culture, the duo’s chemistry and willingness to embrace any half-baked idea was ingratiating at worst and euphoric at best.

by Matt Levine

If you’re wondering why Asghar Farhadi’s acclaimed third feature, Fireworks Wednesday, hasn’t gotten an American release until now—ten years after its original release in Iran—the answer is unsurprising, if depressingly familiar: money. In 2006, Asghar Farhadi was a less recognized name to international movie lovers than Jafar Panahi, whose Offside was released the same year. So while Fireworks Wednesday’s original American release was limited to the festival circuit, its belated distribution ten years later—after A Separation (2011) and The Past (2013) have cemented Farhadi as one of modern cinema’s great humanist filmmakers—amends that mistake, proving why Farhadi deserves to be mentioned alongside his compatriots Panahi and Abbas Kiarostami (though his style, tone, and subjects often differ markedly from them).

by Matt Levine

by Matt Levine

Anthology films are a tough undertaking, often prone to a measure of unevenness and redundancy; maybe no other narrative structure is more difficult to sustain. This is true of The High Sun, a Croat-Serbian-Slovenian co-production with three parts linked by the theme of love during wartime. The same two actors, Tihana Lazovic and Goran Markovic, appear as starcrossed romantic protagonists in three different time periods a decade apart—1991, 2001, and 2011. Each story has something to do with deep-seated hatred between Serbs and Croats endangering love, and if each tale too often succumbs to predictable clichés—from snickering, gun-toting soldiers to hunky handymen to drug trips conveyed via blurry lenses and weird camera angles—they’re also enlivened by heated performances and some beautiful widescreen cinematography (by Marko Brdar).

by Matt Levine

​In a political climate where scientific facts are often dismissed in favor of bipartisan vitriol, fantasy movies about noble scientists preventing the end of the world have suddenly become chic. Last year’s Tomorrowland envisioned an alternate universe where scientists are jettisoned to start fresh, escaping the greed and political turmoil that have almost guaranteed the earth’s destruction. This year, it’s the French animated fantasy April and the Extraordinary World that depicts a dystopian planet stuck in the Dark Ages after the twentieth century’s greatest scientists go missing. Surprisingly morbid yet consistently exciting, April and the Extraordinary World offers a somewhat tepid indictment of man’s petty quests for power, but the real thrills are provided by gorgeous animation and a unique steampunk setting that resembles Mad Max transplanted to fin de siècle France.

by Matt Levine

​My Golden Days ends with a freeze-frame even more powerful than the one that closes François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959): youth interrupted at the peak of its hopefulness, as though the characters happened to look life in its eyes and were stopped in their tracks. French artworks have a long history of bottling the bittersweet brevity of youth, from writers such as Marcel Proust and Jean-Jacques Rousseau to filmmakers like Truffaut and Louis Malle. It’s a difficult balance, evoking both the joy and the sadness of being young, its sense of infinite expectancy and lurking fatalism. At its best, this focus on youth seems to convey, in a few short hours or several hundred pages, the electricity of being alive.

by Matt Levine

by Matt Levine

​Ripples on the surface of the Amazon River form the first image of Embrace of the Serpent, shimmering in black-and-white and seeming to conceal something unknown inside. From the very start, the film reveals its links to surrealism, specifically when one character implores another (before a transcendental drug trip) to experience a world “realer than reality,” recalling one of surrealism’s main credos: that there’s a hidden layer of reality right before our eyes, one that we could see if only we looked hard enough. The surrealism of Embrace of the Serpent, though, is different, more melancholy and more humane. It stems from the belief that human life is all interconnected, diverging from a spiritual place that may or may not be found within the jungles of the Amazon.

by Matt Levine

Creative Control is absolutely a movie of our time; whether or not that’s a good thing depends on your tolerance for the Digital Age and its accompanying self-obsession. To be sure, the film condemns this shallow culture, ultimately making the point that the preponderance of digital devices and social-media platforms in our lives forces us to crave an artificiality that actually makes us miserable. But in order to arrive at this sensitive, humane conclusion, Creative Control wades through a lot of narcissism and glibness, as infatuated as it is dismayed with its characters’ flaws.

by Matt Levine

First-time directors throughout the history of film have turned to the horror genre to make an indelible mark. “Godfather of Gore” Herschell Gordon Lewis made a living knocking out schlocky horror pics on minuscule budgets; John Carpenter defined a subgenre with his first feature, Halloween (1978). David Lynch avoided the confines of the horror genre per se, but still made terrifying early shorts and one of the most hauntingly beautiful feature debuts with Eraserhead (1977); and a few decades later, Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick, with the help of some shrewd and influential online marketing, made blurry handheld video truly frightening in The Blair Witch Project (1999).