Browsing: review

Move over, “Alice in Wonderland” and “The Wizard of Oz” — you too, “Spirited Away” and “The Chronicles of Narnia.” There’s a new eye-popping portal fantasy in town and its name is “Wildwood.” This is a thoroughly involving and captivating stop-motion adventure from Laika, the animation studio that made such other beautiful handmade works as…

When last we saw Téa Leoni on television, she had become the first female president of the United States after six seasons of the CBS drama “Madam Secretary”; seven years later, she’s teaching middle school science on an NBC sitcom, “Newlyweds,” in both cases married to Tim Daly, who is incidentally her real-life spouse. I’m…

Young adult stories come in every imaginable flavor, and flavor combination, and several are present in “Phony,” premiering Tuesday on Hulu. Based on the four episodes (of eight) out for review, I am all in with this show, but as Doris Day so memorably sang, the future’s not ours to see. Created and directed in…

Jaclyn Backhaus’ “Wives,” which opened Sunday at East West Players’ David Henry Hwang Theater, examines the condition of women in four different eras: 16th century France, 1920 India, 1960s Idaho and present-day “Oxbridge,” an elite British university fictional hybrid. This isn’t an epic work but a compilation of comic sketches tied together with heavy thematic…

Is there anything more worrisome about today’s tech titans than the fact that they present as abundance-minded optimists but in actuality are gluttonous, scorched-earth pessimists? Documentarian Alex Gibney is no stranger to dissections of corrupting power — from his feature dives into Enron, Elizabeth Holmes and Scientology. He frames his deeply researched four-hour psych eval…

Aaron Sorkin’s “The Social Reckoning,” a sequel to 2010’s David Fincher-directed “The Social Network,” is hitting theaters as part of a surge of tech geek takedowns that includes documentaries on Elon Musk and Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes, as well as Luca Guadagnino’s upcoming comedy “Artificial” about OpenAI’s Sam Altman. Still, its timing couldn’t be worse. Cursory…

Using interviews filmed on rooftops at night in Tel Aviv, the documentary “NAZA” uncovers Israel’s brutal methodology of warfare in Gaza since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre that took 250 hostages and killed at least 1,200 people. The testimony offered by these insiders is under the cloak of darkness, but the light it shines…

Mackenzie Crook, who wrote and directed “Detectorists,” a gorgeous pastoral comedy about hobbyist hunters seeking Saxon gold in southwest England, has a new series, “Small Prophets,” premiering Wednesday on Apple TV. Set mainly around a suburban cul-de-sac, a retirement home and a “DIY store” (think Home Depot), it’s a different sort of series and yet…

The Food and Drug Administration expects to complete its safety review of theabortion pill mifepristone in March, according to a court document the Justice Department filed Wednesday.

Chris Rock’s compelling tragicomedy “Misty Green” opens with a montage of Los Angeles that’s as intimate as an X-ray of a tumor. The city is sick, as evidenced in photos of barren studio lots, burning trees and the boarded-up Cinerama Dome. But we’re also seeing L.A. through the lens of someone who respects it anyway.…