It’s weirdly funny to see a year mentioned in the title of “Art College 1994,” an animated Chinese college dorm rom-com about young people and their greatest loves, themselves. You could easily imagine this feature-length cartoon taking place in another time or place without losing much of either its specificity or universality. Swap out a Nirvana poster or a multi-tiered tape-deck stereo, and you’ll still have an unsentimental and quietly unsparing portrait of idealistic undergrads at a pivotal moment when they start to realize how small they are in the world that awaits them after grad ..read more

Actor and producer Terry Carter has died in New York City. The former co-star of TV's “McCloud” and “Battlestar Galactica” was 95. Carter's death follows on the heels of Black male stars Jim Brown, Richard Roundtree, Carl Weathers, Lou Gossett, Jr., and athlete-actor O.J. Simpson. Carter, born in Brooklyn in 1928, was older than them all. He was of Afro-Latin descent, and his given name was John DeCoste. In a predominantly Italian community, his childhood best friend grew up to be jazz pianist Cecil Taylor. Carter also played some jazz piano as a young man. Carter attended various colleges, i ..read more

There’s an ongoing theme in Alexander Payne’s films -- the people we think are the antagonists aren’t actually bad people; we simply force ourselves into the corner of seeing them that way. From the simple-minded and unfortunately coiffed future in-laws in “About Schmidt” to the adulterous characters in “Sideways” and “The Descendants,” to the animosity of the student-teacher relationship at the heart of “The Holdovers,” these films all feature cases of the protagonists incorrectly viewing someone as their nemesis. These perceived enemies eventually become characters with whom we de ..read more

By now, we’re all aware that Elisabeth Moss can do anything. She’s proven it again and again in film and television. However, seeing the star of “Mad Men” and “The Handmaid’s Tale” play a suave super-spy with a British accent in the opening scenes of FX’s “The Veil” is initially off-putting. Really? It’s not just the accent that seems wrong at first; Moss is not the first person one would think to cast as an MI6 genius who has a 007 background and a license to kill. Unsurprisingly, this initial sense that Moss isn’t quite right for this part dissipates almost entirely by the end of the first ..read more

There are windows throughout “Nowhere Special,” real and symbolic. Over the opening credits, we view windows, giving us glimpses of the outside and a couple of interiors in a rural Irish town. One of those windows is being carefully soaped and squeegeed by John (James Norton). He smiles at a black and white cat on the other side of the glass. James is a single dad to three-year-old Michael (an extraordinary performance by Daniel Lamont). We first see him looking through their apartment window, waiting for John to come home. As soon as Michael sees his father, he goes to the door so he can see ..read more

A weak year for video games so far should get a little bit of a jolt from Sony and Shift Up’s “Stellar Blade,” available this week exclusively on the PS5. Inspired by all kinds of post-apocalyptic gaming, it sometimes feels like a blend of “The Last of Us,” “Fallout,” and “Final Fantasy,” and those influences alone mean it will have fans. It’s a game with some refreshingly fun gameplay and intriguing world-building that’s equally hampered by some clunky mechanics and repetitive settings. However, “Stellar Blade” is a game that rewards patience—just when you get completely exhausted by somethi ..read more

Every genre has a moment, usually dating back to silent film, where you can start to see it crystallize before your very eyes. Science fiction has “A Trip to the Moon,” the American Western has “The Great Train Robbery,” and even the mob movie has “The Musketeers of Pig Alley.” Until “Girl Shy,” starring silent era comedian Harold Lloyd, we had romantic films and we had comedic films. But here, in the story of a shy young tailor’s apprentice who can barely summon up the courage to talk to girls until he meets Mary (Jobyna Ralston), the two narrative elements are blended more cohesively than e ..read more

The Academy’s Board of Governors has approved awards rules and campaign promotional regulations for the 97th Academy Awards.  Many of these changes feel both like revisions to pandemic-era exceptions, as well as reactions to recent qualms about qualifying periods for new releases and, most significantly, the Best Original Score category. Let's take a look at the biggest changes. BEST PICTURE QUALIFICATIONS   For Academy Awards consideration, a feature film must have a qualifying theatrical release between January 1, 2024, and December 31, 2024. Films distri ..read more

Love songs can be so trite. Rom-coms can be so formulaic. Because we spend much of our lives thinking about love, it’s no surprise that artists are similarly obsessed with matters of the heart. Yet so many of their efforts are dreadful. Chalk it up to how subjective one’s feelings on romance can be. Some find its truest expression in a Celine Dion ballad. Others gravitate to a Glen Powell flick. The art that speaks to you about the complexity, beauty and anxiety of love is so personalized—it can’t be wrong, but others may not understand. For almost 20 years now, Luca Guadagnino has been my go ..read more

After two “Sonic the Hedgehog” movies that involved Hollywood court ordering the blue blur to do the same mundane story as every popular property does by shipping him to Earth and spewing pop culture references as the basis of humor, it's come to the point that Sonic fans, young and old, might develop Sonicholm Syndrome. If you can't run faster than the mediocrity, accept it. Be that it may, one of the standout characters in “Sonic the Hedgehog 2” was Idris Elba's vocal take on the red warrior-obsessed barbarian Knuckles the Echidna. Having no knowledge of Earth's customs, lending to no pop c ..read more