Yes, Obvious Child is a romantic comedy. And, yes, it includes an abortion. But describing it as an “abortion rom-com” sells short what a thoughtful story director Gillian Robespierre has crafted. Jenny Slate portrays 20-something stand-up comedian Donna Stern, who was “dumped up with” and recently lost her job as…
The Fault in Our Stars made heaps of money at the box office, and film critics Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek wonder if a recent piece declaring that adults should feel ashamed to read young adult novels has any weight to it. They also talk about The Immigrant and film…
When Phil Lord and Chris Miller pitched their idea for a 21 Jump Street movie, a film everyone thought was, at best, a moronic moneymaker, they had one bold proposal: “What if the twist is that we try to make it really good?” says Lord. “That’s basically a summary of…
Multi-hyphenate actor Clark Gregg understands that hard work and perseverance don’t necessarily pay off in Hollywood. Since moving to Los Angeles in 1992, the star of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has directed two feature films and scripted three, none of which are the work he’s best known for. Gregg knows…
If you think summer movies are clamorous, try a current Broadway musical. Watching Jersey Boys onstage is like soldiering through some extreme eating contest where you’re force-fed dessert for three hours. It’s all falsetto heroics and hustled-through character drama, every beat of every scene over-scored, over-rehearsed, and overbearing. And it’s…
In William Eubank’s new sci-fi thriller The Signal, three friends are driving across the country when they have an online run-in with a creepy, enigmatic hacker named Nomad. When they chase after the hacker’s IP address, they find something very unexpected. It’s hard to talk about the film without giving…
For all the Fox News fear-mongering that Hollywood is out to indoctrinate us with liberal values, when it comes to pregnancy, the movies have for years been curiously conservative. If a woman gets knocked up, she either loses the baby by accident (cue waterworks) or carries it to term (cue…
If you ever have days when you prefer animals to human beings, How to Train Your Dragon 2 is your kind of movie. In some ways, the second entry in this animated franchise is inferior to the first, released in 2010: The plot is needlessly busy, and much of the…
One of the biggest selling points of 21 Jump Street, the 2012 TV-remake comedy, turned out to be its seemingly unscripted lunacy, the way it put Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill in police-shorts outfits and let them riff on their characters’ mutual ineptitude. Sometimes you need a little flapdoodle, and…
Cancer, so costly in real life, can be thrown around pretty cheaply in fiction, which is why most cautious readers and moviegoers are wary of it as a plot element. Call it the Love Story syndrome. But the presence of mortal illness has always been a staple of romantic melodrama,…
James McAvoy knows not to trust the British tabloids. While flogging his grotty drama Filth, based on the Irvine Welsh novel about a coke-addicted, double-crossing cop, they breathlessly reported that the Scottish actor had dived so deep into method acting that he’d convinced a German hooker to punch him in…
In 1986, peaceniks were mad at Tom Cruise. That year, the Navy thanked Top Gun for boosting enlistment by 20,000 recruits. Since then, he’s made more critiques of military than advertisements, most of which (Lions for Lambs, Born on the Fourth of July, The Last Samurai, Valkyrie) j’accuse bad leadership…
The Western genre isn’t entirely comprised of spaghetti or John Wayne talking out the side of his mouth: From its earliest days, filmmakers were putting a comic spin on stories set on the dusty trail, with the genre hitting its apex between the mid ’70s and mid ’80s. We’ve gathered…
Remarkable as it seems, there’s still poetry to be found in the idea of kids tooling around with nothing much to do. Whether you grew up in a small town or a midsize-to-large city, in 1962, 1982, or 2002, you probably remember getting into a car, unwisely, with the first…
We’re still adjusting to Seth MacFarlane as a big-screen star. Not just because his breakneck absurdist humor often demands viewers pause and rewind, but because the man himself looks like a hand-inked cartoon, with his black, pupil-less eyes and an alabaster baby face that, lacking cheekbones that could carve in…
Boil Maleficent down to one newt’s nose-size piece of advice and you’d get this: Don’t dump Angelina Jolie. It’s not a problem most mortals will face, but as seen through director Robert Stromberg’s lens, the antlered arch-villain of Sleeping Beauty is a sympathetic scorned woman, equal parts Gloria Gaynor, Princess…
The phrase “summer movies” will never not mean broad, action-driven crowd-pleasers to me: I counted the days until Batman (June 23, 1989), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (July 3, 1991), and Jurassic Park (June 11, 1993) were released. For every Dark Knight, there are 10 Prometheuses — and that’s just among…
Let’s rewind 20 years, to the summer of 1994. O.J. Simpson has been arrested for murder, the World Cup is in America and being ignored, and the biggest hits at the multiplex are Forrest Gump, The Lion King, True Lies, and Speed. Notice anything odd about those movies? There’s not…
When first-time director Gillian Robespierre’s festival favorite Obvious Child makes its theatrical debut in June, it could herald the sweetest, funniest, most unassuming cinematic revolution in years. Starring former Saturday Night Live bit player Jenny Slate in a ravishing star turn, the romantic comedy quickly caught attention at Sundance for…
You have to hand it to James McAvoy, who has made a career out of his amiable, boyish good looks; in Filth, he destroys that image. As Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson, he’s a booze-bloated, greasy wreck who appears about 20 years older, all busted capillaries and shit-eating grin. He’s not…
Comic nerds and blockbuster buffs probably don’t need reminding, but X-Men: Days of Future Past hits theaters today. The latest film in the Marvel franchise follows the X-Men’s older and younger selves as they fight across two time periods to save mankind. While X-Men favorites like Wolverine, Mystique, and Professor…
It was Jason Tugman’s first day of work. Almost a decade later, he still remembers the screams. A former circus fire-eater, he’d taken a job as a lighting technician for The Oprah Winfrey Show after burning off a chunk of his tongue. The pay was $32 an hour and he…
