My Courses

Transgender philosopher-filmmaker Paul B. Preciado’s “Orlando, My Political Biography” starts with footage of the filmmaker on a city street at night, wheatpasting posters with slogans, questions, and cryptic statements, and only becomes more playfully abstruse from there. The film is “political” in that politics are personal, and less of a biography than a work of literary criticism in…

There’s something refreshing about the plainly weird premise of “Dream Scenario”. Nicolas Cage plays a nondescript evolutionary biology professor named Paul Matthews, who suddenly appears in the dreams of his students, daughters, and people he does not know. He doesn’t do anything in their recurring nighttime hallucinations of anxiety or horror, in which people sometimes float into…

Albert Brooks has been one of the giants of American comedy for half a century. “Albert Brooks: Defending Your Life” is a tribute to his talent and insight, directed by actor/filmmaker Rob Reiner, who met Brooks at Beverly Hills High School and has been his best friend ever since. Framed by a leisurely dinner between Brooks…

Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie want you to simmer in the uncomfortable awkwardness of “The Curse,” their 10-episode new series for Showtime about a couple whose lives dissolve while they make a generally awful home-flipping show. So, the fact that it starts to drag after an incredible first few episodes feels by design. No one…

If you put Nancy Drew in a teen slasher take of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” you’d get the bloody yet spirited “It’s a Wonderful Knife.” More than an assemblage of its familiar parts, director Tyler MacIntyre’s film intensely opens with Henry Waters (Justin Long), the self-absorbed real estate agent of the quaint small town Angel…