Every male comedian worth his salt has to dress in drag at some point. It’s a rite of passage for those well-adjusted enough to understand how a set of tits can accent their balls. And Adam Sandler makes for one hell of a woman in Jack and Jill. He really stirs up those funny feelings, which get funnier when the Subway foot-long pedophile Jared Fogle makes a cameo, as does the ShamWow guy. They tend to overshadow the Johnny Depp…

Whenever I think about comedy and politics in the movies, I think of Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and how Chaplin said he could not have made fun of the Nazis had he known the extent of what was happening in the camps. He bravely made a funny film sort of accidentally, and then self-consciously declared his famous folly inappropriate. All these years later and all these years dumber, I wonder if Happy Madison productions and Robert Smigel might consider You…

Schindler’s List exposes the medium of cinema as a fraud—not for nothing, but Spielberg tried very hard to avoid this. A very cautious Spielberg did all one could do to insure the gravity of the Holocaust would be represented in his film story of the Schindlerjuden, the “Schindler Jews,” and their hero, Oskar Schindler. A defensive film in all its formal and aesthetic qualities, it guards against any ill-intention or misinterpreted cinematic grandiosity. Choosing to film it in black and…

Boots Riley has an eye for design and a passion for politics. But filmmaking? I’m not so sold. Reminiscent of Wes Anderson’s meticulous sets and playful style made janky and free-wheeling, with a revved-up cartoony-ness that is some parts Looney Tunes and equal parts anime, for all its vision, metaphors, and radical leftist theory, this film feels sluggish, weighed down by all that is stuffed in it like Keke Palmer’s body suit stuffed full of stolen clothes. Even the bonkers…