Movie Background Daily

Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) starts with an ad for Stratton Oakmont; the commercial makes us believe the brokerage firm is a golden American institution, a pillar of financial stability, as traditional, trustworthy, and established as if the Mayflower passengers had etched the very name into Plymouth Rock. Cut to the nightmarish circus of a rollicking party on the trading floor of the company—not unlike what we’ve imagined went on in Rome before the fall (all but the roller-skating chimp and snorting coke off hookers, of course)—and then freeze-frame on the billionaire brokers tossing a dwarf at a huge velcro target, literally and figuratively abusing the Little Guy. Stratton Oakmont is America, its founder proudly proclaims in the ad. How horrifying is it to realize that he just might be right? The tale that follows the fictional commercial amounts to a nonstop barrage of drug-fueled decadence adapted by Terence Winter from real-life stockbroking swindler Jordan Be...

Adapted from the novel by Sarah Perry, “The Essex Serpent” concerns the emergence of a monster that may not even exist. There are gruesome clues of its existence: a young girl's corpse is found awfully chewed up; a long fence of nets, meant to capture it, is destroyed. A bonafide underwater troll no one can comprehend, the mythological serpent causes a small town's collective mental stability to go MIA.  But “The Essex Serpent,” a compelling and surprising six-episode adaptation now playing on Apple TV+, uses this mystery only for surface appeal. With nuanced performances from the likes of Claire Danes, Tom Hiddleston, Clémence Poésy and Frank Dillane, the story finds deeper purpose in ruminating on other entities that easily scare people when they do not understand them: science; socialism; progress. Heaven forbid that many of those ideas be embodied by a woman right on the cusp of the 20th century. That person is Cora Seaborne (Claire Danes), an archaeologist who ventures to ...

Christina Ricci does most, if not all, of the emotional lifting in the lightweight horror drama “Monstrous,” a period piece about a single mom and her son who, in 1955, run away from home and re-settle in an isolated lakeside house. Ricci plays Laura Butler, an independent, emotionally fragile single mom who tries to escape her past—particularly her ex-husband—but finds it anyway in her new home, which is also haunted by a Gilman-like seaweed monster. The monster in question doesn’t always look great—this is a Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment production—and there’s not much to the tired plot twists that ultimately help viewers to better understand Laura and Cody (Santino Barnard), her withdrawn seven-year-old son. But Ricci’s compelling performance, with essential support from director Chris Sivertson (“All Cheerleaders Die,” “I Know Who Killed Me”), makes you want to follow Laura as she inevitably falls apart. The plot of “Monstrous” develops incrementally through canned revela...

Following in the animated footsteps of “The Simpsons Movie” and “South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut,” the Belchers make the leap this week to the big screen in “The Bob’s Burgers Movie,” a delightful little romp that should appeal mostly to fans of the show, even if hardcore devotees might feel like there are a few 4-5-episode runs of the series that are stronger than this film. On the fresh side of the bun, “The Bob’s Burgers Movie” is briskly plotted and nails the big heart and wonderful characters of the beloved FOX show. On the stale side, it lacks a little in the ambition department, setting up an interesting tale of various issues of doubt within the members of the Belcher clan only to not do much with that set-up until a rushed finale. But it’s never boring, and it’s smarter than most pop culture-obsessed children’s entertainment. Anything that brings the joy of loving “Bob’s Burgers” to a wider audience is a good thing, even if I mostly hope this does well enough to guarante...