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New York City is loaded with oddities, and director Crystal Moselle has picked a doozie in making a documentary film about the Angulo family. The Wolfpack is an interesting and engaging documentary, intriguing in what it shows and intriguing in what it intimates. The Wolfpack is what six brothers name themselves, in homage to Marvel Comics and Hollywood, when they finally venture out into New York City after spending almost their entire lives inside a cramped public housing apartment, watching and re-enacting movies. A captivity narrative The film is essentially raw material for a psychological

Ex Machina, the 2015 film written and directed by Alex Garland, is a wonderfully scripted and nicely paced thriller, with good acting and a fine, creepy sort of claustrophobia and menace. The film’s sci fi premise, scale, and CGI are relatively modest, as films go. The central story is not new: a brilliant Silicon Valley type coding and invention genius has secretly created not just breakthrough Artificial Intelligence coding, but robots as well. Nathan is akin to Dr. Frankenstein in wanting to create life, although he does this with cynicism and tech industry hipness. Nathan

I’m not sure what the fuss is about this film. Even without having read the book on which this is based, we can see that the film is hobbled by its effort to include the book’s journal-writing component, its essential lack of two-person scenes, and by reticence about the central character’s past failures and character flaws. Unlike A.O. Scott of The New York Times, I think the film fails to enrich the character by its brief fragments of back-story. Most of those back-story hints involve the protagonist’s failures and weaknesses, and that back-story is shown

In The Homesman, the central human dilemma is how the various characters form, avoid or break attachments with others, a primal matter in even the most benign of circumstances, let alone in the rough 1850s Nebraska territory. Caring too much for others brings misery, but not going along to get along also brings misery. Do the characters play well with others? Most of the men certainly do not, and much of the film is about how women try to cope with or succumb to this harsh world. Traditional westerns retell the gradual mythy victory of