Village Voice Media film critic Karina Longworth is soaking up the silver screen at the Toronto International Film Festival this week. Come back to Jackalope Ranch every day for dispatches from TIFF.The best, most daring and form-defying documentaries in the world right now are being funded by the Danish Film…
Village Voice Media film critic Karina Longworth is soaking up the silver screen at the Toronto International Film Festival this week. Come back to Jackalope Ranch every day for dispatches from TIFF.This is a blog post about two movies that were screened for the press within the first 24 hours…
The story of “Booker’s Place: A Mississippi Story,” began while Yvette Johnson was doing research for a project in her ASU Family History Writing class almost five years ago. Johnson was looking for more information about her grandfather, Booker Wright, who was killed a year before she was born. In…
After its Sundance première, Compliance might be infamous as the film that inspired a woman to cry out “Rape is not entertainment!” However, writer/director Craig Zobel is not Daniel Tosh. Judging from the film itself, which keeps its final sexual assault entirely offscreen, Zobel seems to agree with that heckler/critic…
Remember way back when Bridesmaids was released, and Manohla Dargis referred to it as “unexpectedly funny”? (It’s amazing what still survives the editorial gauntlet at The New York Times). And then a couple of months ago, podcast host Adam Carolla cast his douchey feelings into words regarding women’s inferior capacity…
Like antidepressants, artificial sugars, Botox, and other miracle inventions of the past century, corporate culture became an omnipresent fact of life before anyone could know how it would affect the human body and brain on an extended timeline. One way to look at writer/director Craig Zobel’s second feature, Compliance —…
Weddings make such bitchin’ film scenarios because the stakes are believably high: If anything goes wrong, social opprobrium, the loss of your beloved, or both can ensue, right in front of your disdainful parents, the clergy, and probably Vince Vaughn or somebody. Directors have placed every obvious symbol of holy…
The story goes that while filming in Tunisia in the summer of 1980, Steven Spielberg avoided the dysentery that afflicted most of the cast and crew of Raiders of the Lost Ark by holing up in his hotel room with a suitcase full of SpaghettiOs. Like most studio-approved behind-the-scenes errata,…
The big movie event of September will be the anticipated latest from a certain filmmaker who signs his films with the surname Anderson and a pair of initials, a prodigious talent who burst onto the scene with a stylish entry in the mid-’90s crime-thriller wave and never left. The master…
“I’ve made six movies, and I feel like I’m only just finally figuring out how this business fucking works,” Paul Thomas Anderson says on an August afternoon in Queens, New York, where later that night he will preview his latest film. The movie is The Master, Anderson’s first in the…
If you’ve seen the 2010 musical film featuring a double dose of diva – Cher and Christina Aguilera – then you might think you know about the sultry, theatrical and sometimes humorous world of burlesque. Local filmmaker Douglas Proce wants to shed a different light on the scene through his…
Screening the history of bootlegging in urban America led to the invention of a genre — the gangster film — but moviegoers have seen little of the hills and hollers whence the syndicates’ potent spirits were shipped. Offhand, I can only think of Robert Mitchum’s homegrown 1958 vehicle Thunder Road…
It’s Pollyanna-ish to complain when companies that are in the business of making money on movies make certain movies solely to make money. And yet, it seems to be widely acceptable to be cynical about big-budget movies that are made, marketed, and released in order to sate an appetite that…
See also: David Cronenberg’s Vision of the Cosmopolis See also: The Lurid Pleasure of Killer Joe While Hispanic Heritage Month officially won’t start until Saturday, September 15, Phoenix Art Museum’s film festival Cine Latino will get a jump start on celebrating. Thanks to a grant from the Academy of Motion…
About two-thirds of the way through “Premium Rush,” the latest entry into cycling’s cinematic cannon, the film’s hero Wilee (as in Coyote, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) says one of the great truisms about our two-wheeled, human powered machines. “Bikes want to go fast.” And so does “Premium Rush” — especially…
According to the University of Maryland Medical Center one in every 200,000 live twin births worldwide are conjoined, though 40 to 60 percent are stillborn and 35 percent of those who survive only live for a day. Conjoined Twins (less commonly referred to as Siamese Twins following the birth of…
At one point in Killer Joe, a hideously funny tabloid noir set on the outskirts of Dallas County, Chris Smith (Emile Hirsch) is let into the family double-wide by a relation whose face has just been pummeled into a Rorschach blot of dried gore. He doesn’t stop to ask what…
Boyishly lean, with a brooding angularity that suggests both high maintenance and nefarious vacancy, Robert Pattinson has managed to fill the role of a grade-A male sex symbol without ever evincing anything like carnal energy, to top the Hollywood A list as a representative of the undead. Pattinson’s casting in…
The transformation might be complete: The crap-and-gore, genre-mincing Tasmanian devil of Asian pulp psychosis Takashi Miike we’ve come to know and, well, kinda semi-love since 1999’s Audition seems now to have finished evolving into a tasteful, even resonant art house master. It has only taken him 50 movies or so…
Hit & Run, a new action comedy engineered by faintly Muppety co-director/writer/star Dax Shepard, is as much about running mouths as running motors and injects estrogen into the few remaining enclaves of American testosterone, muscle cars, and FM cock rock. Shepard plays Charlie Bronson, a 35-year-old in Nowheresville whose life,…
“I’ll just tell you straight out, Killer Joe is the most disturbing film I’ve ever made,” William Friedkin says. This is really something, coming from a filmmaker who has spent much of an eclectic career testing audience limits. The Exorcist riled Catholics and had theaters stocking barf bags in 1973;…
Remember how action movies used to be? The good old-fashioned American (but often European-accented) ones from the ’80s and ’90s, the type paid tribute to (but not necessarily re-created) in the Expendables movies? No offense to your Iron Men and your Jason Bournes, but I miss movies like Die Hard,…
