There’s terrific comic potential in the idea at the heart of Don Verdean, the latest shrug of a film from Jared and Jerusha Hess, the husband-wife writer-director team behind Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre, and one that for good reason you haven’t seen, Gentlemen Broncos. That idea: A fraud of a…
Years after Moby-Dick was a flop, Herman Melville visited an old ship’s captain named George Pollard. Both men had seen better days. In their youth, both had sailed the seas with some success. Melville had written novels about his adventures with island girls, and Pollard had once helmed one of…
Like grad school or that cave in The Empire Strikes Back, what you get out of Rick Alverson’s bold and desolate Entertainment depends on what you put into it. It’s less a film you watch than a breakdown episode you try to get through, a bottomed-out desert lulu that manages…
One day in 1964, while 5-year-old Neil Logan was home alone watching The Wallace and Ladmo Show, Ladmo held up a drawing Logan had done. “They used to ask kids to send in drawings all the time,” recalls the 66-year-old artist, known today for his bronze figurative sculptures. “This time,…
Yes, knowledge is power. But gaining that knowledge can get pretty expensive. This week we’ve gathered some workshops, storytelling events, film screenings and more that will help you hone in on some new skills and keep some of that hard-earned cash in your wallet, where it belongs. And we also…
Oh Zeus, hear my lament that I was not present when Spike Lee imagined updating Lysistrata to present-day Chicago. I bet he burst himself cackling. Aristophanes’ 411 B.C. comedy, written during the three-decade Peloponnesian War, concocts a crazy scheme: Women refuse sex until their blue-balled men give in and declare…
Bees are such tiny, seemingly inconsequential creatures, yet milligram for milligram, they affect the landscape in profound ways. You could say the same about small, delicate movies like Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher’s 2014 Cannes Grand Prix winner The Wonders, which tells the story of a hippie beekeeper family in the…
Yes, Janis Joplin made a hell of a record out of Rodgers & Hart’s “Little Girl Blue,” but you’re right if you winced to learn that Amy Berg’s new documentary feature about Joplin takes that song as its title — and as its dismal argument and organizing principle. “I want…
Though movie-goers have known for a while that Harkins Camelview 5 is closing, the art house theater’s days are officially numbered. As of this writing, the much-loved 1973 movie house known for being a hub of indie cinema in the Valley has just over a week before its final films…
In a 2001 interview, producer Lee Mendelson recalled the reaction of a CBS executive who attended a screening of A Charlie Brown Christmas shortly before it was scheduled to premiere, on December 9, 1965: “Well, it’s in the TV Guide logs — we gotta put it on the air. Nice…
Maybe Cars and the Hot Wheels-ification of Pixar has been a good thing. Now that the storied studio has, like its rivals, puked onto our screens indifferent kid-distracting junk, its new movies come un-freighted from expectations of genius. Miserable as it was, Planes: Fire and Rescue (from corporate parent Disney…
The big breakthrough in Legend, the latest well-crafted studio throwback from writer-director Brian Helgeland (Payback, A Knight’s Tale, 42)? At long last, here’s one movie with two often incomprehensible Tom Hardy characters, sometimes muttering their Cockney swears at each other inside the same scene. Hardy plays twins, real-life gangsters who…
The heads of the City Dionysia, the Grecian playwriting competition that pitted Aeschylus against Sophocles and can be considered the original Oscars, had a rule: no original characters. Instead, the best creative minds of a generation — or really, a millennium — exhausted themselves finding new spins on, say, Medea…
The Nazis lost World War II, but they’ve conquered the American imagination. Seventy years after his suicide, Hitler is still everywhere: in the movies, on YouTube, in political headlines and on the History Channel. The latest manifestation of our Third Reich fixation is The Man in the High Castle, Amazon’s…
Marvel’s Jessica Jones is smart, surprising, and occasionally terrifying, a human tale of trauma and healing in a superhero vein. Its first episodes have more (unexploitative) sex scenes than battles, more shrugs and eye rolls than mighty kapows. But it’s not the shock or novelty that gives it resonance. Jessica…
How funny, really, are dick pics? Millions of them must be snapped and shared each year, as inducement or harassment, celebration or shaming. Perhaps Harper’s Index could tell us the tonnage of coal mined each year to power the transmission of American crotches. So when a dick pic turns up…
With the spectacular The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2, the best in the series, Jennifer Lawrence closes out the franchise that made her the biggest star of her generation. Since The Hunger Games started, in 2012, she’s starred in four of them and only six of everything else. Luckily,…
Comedy isn’t the champagne of bottled beers; it’s Champagne, period, a delicate and perfect achievement in itself when it works. That’s why it’s frustrating when great comic performers feel compelled to prove themselves in what we so solemnly call dramatic roles. The late, scarily brilliant Robin Williams stumbled into love-me…
We’ve gotten used to the idea that the highest-quality, most innovative television lives on premium cable channels like HBO and Showtime. But two of the most delightful and inventive series to premiere in the past year have come from an unexpected place: the CW. Jane the Virgin and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend…
Toni Collette rages through Catherine Hardwicke’s cancer weepie Miss You Already like a fire in a chain restaurant. The film around her is good, welcoming fare, the kind that snobs always underestimate. But then Collette, playing a vain patient bereft at losing her hair and her ability to wear seven-inch…
Newspapers are dead, except in the hearts of anyone who has ever loved them — which means there are still narrow slivers of hope. One of them now comes to us in the form of a movie: Tom McCarthy’s bold, shirtsleeve-sturdy newsroom drama Spotlight, which shows how a team of…
Bryan Cranston parades through Trumbo, a wiki-pageant of shorthand history, like he’s a costumed kid playing Actor Bryan Cranston at a Disney park. As blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, a man given to mannered diction, Cranston layers movieland falseness over the scraped-raw heart of his Breaking Bad triumph. Remember how you…
