Squeaking by with an Obama 2012–size victory margin, Paul Thomas Anderson’s thrillingly strange The Master tops this year’s Voice Film Critics’ Poll. It’s just ahead of Kathryn Bigelow’s electrifying hunt–for–bin Laden procedural, Zero Dark Thirty. Although set some 60 years apart, both films offered portraits of a traumatized America trying…
View the full 2012 Village Voice Film Poll Best film: 1. The Master (333 points; 46 mentions) 2. Zero Dark Thirty (296 points; 43 mentions) 3. Holy Motors (295 points; 46 mentions) 4. Moonrise Kingdom (233 points; 38 mentions) 5. This Is Not a Film (186 points; 28 mentions) 6…
The end of cinema? Hardly. More than ever, boiling this concluding year down to the 10 “best” movies feels both arbitrary and reductive. Ideally, I’d have 25 unnumbered slots. I’d cite another five, formally varied nonfiction films: Tchoupitoulas, Detropia, The Ambassador, Only the Young, and How to Survive a Plague…
Most of the blathering this year about the death of film and film culture has already dissipated. But one gnomic pronouncement endures: Leos Carax describing cinema as “a beautiful island with a cemetery” following the world première of Holy Motors at Cannes. What are the contents of that necropolis? As…
Gay-male weepies have left a long trail of tears, stretching back to the sobbing, self-loathing queens of The Boys in the Band, released one year after the Stonewall insurrection of 1969, and including high-prestige pictures like Philadelphia (1993) and Brokeback Mountain (2005). The genre, most prominent during the first decade…
“Just so you know, it’s going to take a while,” says the CIA officer to his newly arrived colleague at the start of Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty. The year is 2003, the place a secret prison (or “black site”) somewhere in the deserts of the Middle East or Asia,…
“Like a lot of other stuff in my life, I sort of fell backwards into it,” screenwriter Will Beall says of his unexpected perch atop Hollywood’s A-list. Unexpected, because just five years ago Beall was busy working for Tinseltown’s second most famous employer, the Los Angeles Police Department, where he…
Perhaps in response to bombastic mainstream Hollywood, international auteurs often veer toward minimalism — quieter emotions, slower tempos, a tightly defined era and setting. Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes is clearly a man of the art house — his new film, Tabu, was shot on 16mm black-and-white film stock, for starters…
Ah, here it is again: that special time we experience every two to six years when Quentin Tarantino makes a new movie, and people dig out the old “Tarantino just steals everything from such-and-such” arguments. You’ve heard them. Reservoir Dogs is a scene-for-scene rip-off of Ringo Lam’s City on Fire,…
Rock and roll proves the coming-of-age crucible in Not Fade Away, Sopranos creator David Chase’s semiautobiographical feature debut of shaggy hair, shagadelic beauties, and the joy and sorrow wrought from chasing, and failing to achieve, one’s dreams. Chase’s tale of showbiz striving has, in its basic form, been told before:…
Salesmen are typically depicted in screen drama as the quintessential American phonies. The exceptions — in Barry Levinson’s Avalon or Whit Stillman’s Barcelona — are buried under a mountain of films proving the rule. That one set of phonies are being dramatically indicted by actors is an irony that we…
Quentin Tarantino has been Googling himself, and it’s starting to become a problem. The filmmaker, whose eighth feature is Django Unchained, is famously an analog evangelist: He writes his scripts in longhand; he bans cell phones from his sets and hasn’t had one of his own in years; he’s claimed…
Even if the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl has been shrouded in controversy over the last couple of years, there’s been nothing fishy about the games themselves, and this year should be no exception. 2013’s match-up features the number-four Oregon Ducks versus the fifth-ranked Kansas State Wildcats, in what will likely be…
As we age, we typically lose our innocence and purity and with them our ability to dream. Through circumstances often beyond our control, we mature, become adults, and sacrifice the naiveté that gave us such uninhibited hope as children. In an exhibit featuring various media including paint, print, and ceramics,…
Manny Tripodis — owner of popular Scottsdale rock joint The Rogue Bar — is about to add another candle to his birthday cake this weekend, so many of the local indie bands that frequently grace the venue’s stage are putting on a massive show in his honor. The lineup includes…
When the Mayan apocalypse drifted insipidly past, it certainly didn’t feel as though a new era had been ushered in. If anything it felt like Friday. But Tomas Moniz, editor and founder of the acclaimed San Francisco-based zine Rad Dad, has been doing more than his fair share of ushering…
The Phoenix Suns need to get hot fast. The team has an absolutely brutal January schedule which features seven of the teams ahead of the Suns in the Western Conference standings. A good month would give them a fighting chance at a playoff berth in the closing months of the…
Hollywood and scandal go together like Lindsay Lohan and legal woes. One half without the other feels incomplete, and it garners much less attention. While the modern spectacle of sad starlets and crushed careers is entertaining, it’s no new phenomenon. For proof, there’s Billy Wilder’s L.A.-set noir tale Sunset Boulevard…
Many have sought the bounty of gold rumored to be hidden in a mine at Lost Dutchman State Park, but the treasure never has turned up. Folks who attend the 41st Flagg Gem and Mineral Show might be tempted to mount their own search. On display at the expo will…
Now that the holidays are over, it’s time to retreat back to all of the hobbies and habits that would be too hard to explain to those not-with-it relatives. The aptly named Taiyou Con hits the Valley of the Sun on Friday, January 4, to gather Japanese pop culture fans…
Of all the things Donald Trump has given us — a few giant buildings, endless bad-hair-day jokes, faith that a braggadocio troll can still bag a smoking-hot wife — no contribution is greater than the Miss USA and Miss Teen USA pageants. But to become a contestant in these pageants,…
Canada has given us some notable comedians throughout the years. They’ve formed a universal identity with their kooky and slightly off-kilter view that only the most polite society could produce. If you started making a list, you would be hard pressed not to come up with a string of names…
