One of the tragedies of the Internet age is that sometimes movies get attention for all the wrong reasons. When Abdellatif Kechiche debuted Blue Is the Warmest Color in Cannes in May, the festival jury was so taken with the film and its two lead performances that it split the…
Attention, children! Thanksgiving will soon be upon us, and unless the cook in your household provides a vegetarian option, that means turkey — a bird that has been raised to be axed, packaged, and raced to your grocer’s freezer, ultimately to wing its way onto your family’s table. There it…
Recently, Anne Washburn’s astonishing Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play, wrapped up a sold-out run at Playwrights Horizons in New York. I saw the show’s world première in June 2012 at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, where I write about theater. It was one of the most imaginative and unpredictable…
It’s a dumbfounding irony that the fiction of the “entitled, selfish millennial” was invented by Baby Boomers. The generation that created Saturday Night Live and National Lampoon grew up to be weirdly deaf to irony and probably won’t even get what a damning metaphor Last Vegas accidentally turns out to…
It’s almost a relief that Ender’s Game turned out to be a glum bore onscreen, a far-future cadets-in-space military drama whose pretensions to moral inquiry boil down to the guilt a kid may feel after stepping on an anthill. If the film had turned out grand, like the best of…
Prescott may not be a large town, but it made big news when a local mural became the impetus for a national discussion about the intersection of race and public art in Small Town USA. Though the original conflict erupted three years ago, public art in Prescott is still feeling…
Photo by Michael Gibson – © 2012 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Inc. and Screen Gems, Inc. All rights reservedKimberly Peirce and Chloë Grace Moretz in Carrie.On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, Stephanie Zacharek of The Village Voice and Amy Nicholson of L.A. Weekly discuss Kimberly Peirce’s reimagining of Stephen King’s Carrie…
The title All Is Lost promises despair, especially with Robert Redford looking so stolid and weathered and still-got-it golden on the poster. Could this near-silent, you-are-there survival story be another of Redford’s yawps of boomer gloom? Another complaint, like The Company You Keep, about the realization that the world we…
American Horror Story is meant to be scary and often succeeds in being so, but like any good horror movie, it shows a fair amount of sex between the scares. Recurring cast members Dylan McDermott, Lily Rabe, and Evan Peters all get in on the action time and time again,…
Photo by Jaap BuitendijkChiwetel Ejiofor in 12 Years a Slave.On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, Village Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl and L.A. Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson disagree on Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave — a beautifully shot film, contrasting the all-too-visible evil of mankind…
If you like going out to movies on Wednesday night and need a group of friends, the Phoenix Movie Bears are ready and willing to join you in the fold. Originally founded as a social group for gay men who identify as bears, PMB has expanded its reach over the…
The inability to have a child is often treated as a “white people problem,” the province of middle- and upper-class couples who end up resorting to expensive fertility treatments. But Andrew Dosunmu’s supple, observant drama Mother of George puts a different spin on the issue: A woman who longs for…
African-born filmmaker Andrew Dosunmu’s Mother of George takes place in Brooklyn, but it might as well be set on another continent — or even planet. The story of a Nigerian couple trying to conceive a baby in New York, this visually evocative feature appropriates the intricately patterned textiles, blue and…
What’s illegal at Disneyland? Dogs, drugs, alcohol, pamphlets, flags and large coolers. Not listed? Secretly shooting a feature-length movie. But Disneyland couldn’t have imagined director Randy Moore would have the courage to film Escape From Tomorrow on location — and that it would be so horny. In the black-and-white theme…
Kimberly Peirce changes almost nothing in her rallying remake of Brian De Palma’s classic about a troubled telekinetic teenager. She doesn’t have to. Yes, now the mean girls who pelt Carrie with tampons upload a cell phone video of the attack, and the well-meaning jock who squires the school outcast…
The cast of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, the previous Jane Austen modernization from producers Bernie Su and Hank GreenBernie Su and Hank Green captured the hearts, iPhones, Pinterest pages, Instagram accounts, and GetGlue music playlists of teens across America with their 2012 series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, which updated Pride…
Perhaps the best and worst thing about young teenagers is that they’re capable of what George W. Bush fans used to call “great moral clarity.” In HBO’s sure-to-make-you-bawl documentary Valentine Road, Aliyah, a student at E.O. Green Junior High School in Oxnard, California, breaks down the differences between gayness and…
Something’s seemed different about number-one American action hero Bruce Willis lately. His action movie output in recent years has mostly been stunt casting in mediocre sequels (The Expendables 2, G.I. Joe: Retaliation), or supporting roles in little-seen B-movies (Setup, Catch .44, Fire with Fire), as if he’s in a who-can-co-star-with-50-Cent-the-most…
I’m pretty sure the dumbest way to die is killing yourself upon discovering that faking your own death has tricked your forbidden lover into his or her own suicide. The second might be to get gutted in one of the jumbled, perfunctory sword fights that clang up the streets of…
Tom Hanks has built a career out of playing aggressively noble roles, so it’s only natural to want to see him taken down a peg. But it’s no fun to watch him suffer at the hands of Somali pirates in Paul Greengrass’ true-life adventure Captain Phillips. Hanks plays the commander…
“After 40, you have to choose between your ass or your face,” one offscreen spin-class participant remarks to her fellow affluent fitness enthusiasts within the first minute of writer-director Stacie Passon’s poorly conceived Concussion. The remark is a paraphrase of a quote attributed to Catherine Deneuve, and the first of…
During his 2012 presidential campaign, Republican candidate Herman Cain rhapsodized about the fence he’d build on the U.S.-Mexico border: 20 feet tall with barbed wire, electricity, and a moat. “And I would put those alligators in that moat!” he cheered. For Machete Kills, Robert Rodriguez built that fence but left…
