The digital war between critics and audiences isn’t new, but it has seemingly reached a disconcerting inflection point this year. Populist hits based on beloved IPs have garnered fervent reactions from fans who reject criticism and accuse critics of bias, pretentiousness, or both. This prolonged stretch of backlash feels especially precarious amid a film industry

Steven Spielberg’s fourth film about alien encounters is “Disclosure Day,” following “ET: The Extra-Terrestrial,” “War of the Worlds,” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” That inspired us to take another look at what Roger Ebert thought about some of the most famous and infamous alien movies, from the inspiring and friendly to the terrorizing

Hulu’s “Alice & Steve” is wild, uneven, very funny, and surprisingly insightful, even if it’s the kind of show you think you might hate. The first episode establishes the premise: Alice (Nicola Walker) and Steve (Jemaine Clement) are longtime friends now in their fifties. He’s recently divorced, and she’s married with two kids, one in

It finally happened. “Interview with the Vampire” has become “The Vampire Lestat.” Season three of the AMC series goes wild with a full transformation into the long-awaited, much-anticipated adaptation of the second book in The Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice. Books 1 and 2 have seen feature film renditions, but no one knew how to

A celebratory Karlovy Vary International Film Festival revealed its competition lineups on Tuesday. The 60th edition, which will commemorate the 80-year anniversary of the festival’s founding, features a dozen world premieres competing for the Crystal Globe and another dozen films bowing in Proxima–including cinema hailing from Colombia and Myanmar.    The Czech fest, located in a

The hangout sitcom has a few, set-in-stone principles: an attractive, charming cast, struggling to balance the demands of work and love, wrangling an array of neuroses and errors of judgment. When their professional and personal worlds begin to overlap, the narrative ought to become funnier and deeper. Unfortunately, “Not Suitable for Work,” like creator Mindy

Having just come off the set of a movie and renewed my appreciation for accidents, deadlines, compromises, and heartbreak, I thought I’d look back at the work of the much-missed Lynn Shelton, one of the finest unsung American romantic directors. Shelton decided, sadly, what turned out to be more than halfway through her life, that

In the wake of five seasons of “For All Mankind“‘s alt-history time-jumping—currently, we’re in an alternate 2012 where we’ve colonized Mars, and a still-alive John Lennon teamed up with Jay-Z to produced “The Grey Album”—it’s easy to forget the show started as a simple 1960s period piece, with a twist: What if the Russians got

As excited as I was for the Cannes films in the Main Competition, I always look forward to the sidebar sections with just as much, if not more, anticipation. “The Chronology of Water,” “My Father’s Shadow,” “Pillion,” and “Urchin” all premiered in Un Certain Regard last year, while Critics’ Week was the home of “A