Email Author Alan Scherstuhl
From the peak of Anchorman to the nadir of The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, the formula for studio comedies of the last 20 years... More >>
Here's a category idea for bar trivia: Collect one-sentence plot summaries of young-adult novel series and R-rated horror films, and see who... More >>
George R. R. Martin took a break from killing Starks today to send us this list of the notes he would send to the producers of TV shows... More >>
There are times during the affecting tumult of What Maisie Knew when you may think, "At last, a first-rate American movie about what... More >>
Turns out, Ricky Jay is one of those guys who has to sit in the restaurant with his back to the wall. That's not just because the... More >>
"Least you got to see a motherfucker crucify himself," Richard Pryor spits in the most surprising footage director Marina Zenovich has... More >>
The surprise twist in the new M. Night Shyamalan film is that the film is directed by M. Night Shyamalan, a fact that the movie—like the... More >>
There's one key truth that separates the tank-topped gearheads of the Fast and Furious movies from the rest of us. Every problem these... More >>
One of the most beguiling of the many stories all knotted up in Salman Rushdie's brilliant, baggy, exhausting 1981 novel Midnight's... More >>
Has anyone ever been so perfectly cast as Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused? Sculpted entirely of charisma and cheekbones yet... More >>
The good news: Here's a lavish, serious science-fiction picture, one that on occasion transcends big-budget hit-making convention to glance... More >>
Perhaps the first great indie apocalypse potluck comedy, Todd Berger's It's a Disaster aces many of the fundamentals bobbled by too many... More >>
Half a year later, now on Blu-ray and DVD, Django Unchained is still kicking up shit, this time via cross-media trickle-down. TV's LL... More >>
A likable hagiography as nuanced as a plaque at the Cooperstown Hall of Fame, Brian Helgeland's Jackie Robinson bio 42 finds a politic... More >>
"They do move in herds," Sam Neill marvels, purportedly gazing at his director's miracle dinosaurs but in reality directing his... More >>
If real life were like Wrong, Quentin Dupieux's sweetly unnerving experiment in ambient fucked-uppedness, your phone would ring before... More >>
What must Bruce Willis have felt when he discovered that his seven or so minutes of G.I. Joe: Retaliation screen time offer much more... More >>
Across America this weekend, wives and girlfriends will accompany their fellas to G.I. Joe: Retaliation, as boys-shooting-boys movies... More >>
Here's a tale that explains everything: A young Philip Roth, trying to shove his teen brain through Ulysses, is struck by a passage... More >>
Like the blood that gushes forth from the elevators of the Overlook Hotel, brilliant/ridiculous theories of what Stanley Kubrick's The... More >>
Steve Carell's gift is for men who might drown in their own obliviousness. Like his Daily Show reporter or The Office's Michael... More >>
Elisabeth Moss’s face is far from the only reason to savor Top of the Lake, Jane Campion’s smart, bracing, hugely... More >>
Twenty minutes into the first full-length movie based on L. Frank Baum's most beloved novel, a duck pukes into the face of Larry Semon, the... More >>
Calling Happy People: A Year in the Taiga a Werner Herzog film is something like calling the dozen books released in 2012 with James... More >>
Here's a question you can spit back next time someone complains that our popular culture is depraved: "Then why are our high school witches,... More >>
