Max Cea

Elsie Fisher felt like an outcast while growing up in Thousand Oaks, an upper-class suburb just north of Los Angeles. She had social anxiety that led her to “act out and be very weird.” And because she didn’t have a lot of friends, middle school was…

Brooklyn Academy of Music’s BAMCinemaFest, which began its 10th anniversary festival Wednesday, occupies unique territory in the landscape of American film festivals. CinemaFest is small, featuring approximately 25 American independent films every…

Since Kanye West returned to Twitter on April 13, he has tweeted 200-plus times (as of publication). The outpouring has, for the most part, been a mix of self-promotion, philosophical musings, inspirational platitudes and questionable politics — the…

Film noir — the dimly lit, hard-talking pictures featuring dangerous femme fatales and jaded sleuths — has been a recognized genre since 1946. The French critic Nino Frank came up with the term (French for “dark film”) that year, but the…

Despite the implied singularity of its title, Wes Anderson’s new stop-motion feature, Isle of Dogs, takes place on two islands — one (Japan) formerly of dogs, the other (Trash Island) newly of dogs. The turning point, we are told, occurs 20 years in…

David Byrne has not one, but two Van Goghs hanging in his office in the SoHo neighborhood of New York City. Both are reproductions of “The Bedroom,” with one hanging just inches above the other. “There’s a city in China that specializes in art…

Anna Deavere Smith has spent her career transforming. As an actor, she has the uncanny ability to slip seamlessly into another person’s skin, and then in an instant, with the mere removal of shoes or slouch of the shoulders, become someone…

On Wednesday’s episode of Late Night With Seth Meyers, host Seth Meyers began an interview with James Franco by bringing up sexual misconduct allegations that arose on Twitter during Sunday’s Golden Globes. Franco was booked on the show to discuss…

I can’t recall ever witnessing anything at once so carnal and refined as the breakfast order of Daniel Day-Lewis’s British couture designer, Reynolds Woodcock, in Paul Thomas Anderson’s newest film, the ’50s-set Phantom Thread. It’s partially what…

Before I saw I, Tonya — director Craig Gillespie’s tragicomic retelling of Tonya Harding’s tumultuous stint as a prominent American figure skater — Harding was one of those names I knew but couldn’t place. I wasn’t yet born when she triple-axel…

The 2018 Oscars don’t take place until March 4, but chatter and speculation about the upcoming ceremony is already in full swing — and not just regarding the contenders for the major awards. Hollywood’s recent flood of sexual misconduct allegations…

Guillermo del Toro’s newest film, The Shape of Water, which arrives in select theaters on Friday, doesn’t waste any time plunging the viewer into the mind of its main character. The submergence, in fact, is literal. Elisa (Sally Hawkins), a lonely…

The Beatles were eight albums into their career, Bob Dylan was 30, Michael Jackson was six. The likes of Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, Prince, Madonna, Leonard Cohen, the Rolling Stones, Jay-Z, Beyoncé and Kanye West have never pulled it off.…

Denis Villeneuve sees the future. The French-Canadian director — who, over the past few years, has emerged as one of the most singular and visionary auteurs working in cinema today — is in the middle of a run of ambitious sci-fi films. First was…

Caleb Landry Jones always seems to bite it. Across film and TV, the actor’s characters have been stabbed in the leg and stomped out (Get Out), burned to death (Heaven Knows What), blown up (American Made) and shot by their own hand (Twin Peaks: The…

It was hard to be shocked on Thursday when the New York Times published a story in which five women accused Louis C.K. of sexual misconduct — a story which C.K. confirmed in a statement on Friday. C.K.’s actions — in particular, that he had exposed…

California is vast. This should go without saying, since it’s the third-biggest state in America according to square footage, and the biggest regarding population. But California is often reduced to its marquee coastal cities, Los Angeles and San…

Well, at least George Clooney tried. With Suburbicon, Clooney once again assumes the role of director, this time taking on a long-dormant Coen brothers script and infusing it with a would-be progressive subplot about integration in mid-20th-century…

As Woody Allen’s film Wonder Wheel gears up for its limited U.S. release in December, the director’s next movie — an in-production project currently titled A Rainy Day in New York — is already a source of controversy, thanks to its reported use of…