The lauded “Golden Age” of television just makes Vince Gilligan sad. Let’s get specific: “The sadness for me at the heart of it is that television now makes stories for grownups that Hollywood movies don’t allow filmmakers to make,” the Breaking Bad creator/writer/director/producer said Sunday at New York’s Museum of…
Porn re-inserts itself into the arthouse with this week’s The Canyons, co-starring adult industry stud James Deen, and next week’s Lovelace, a biopic of the Deep Throat star — two highly publicized releases that reconfirm the hopelessness of going hardcore in mainstream movies. Whether it’s works that inject un-simulated sex…
Back in May, Welcome Diner turned from pop-up restaurant to pop-up theater when it hosted the première screening of Arrested Development’s new season on Netflix. Now the established diner calls to local filmmakers as it hosts its first ever Southern Summer 48-Hour Film Fest…
Pacific Rim was released a couple of weekends ago, detailing humanity’s war with extra-dimensional giant monsters known as Kaiju. In the film, the Earth forces managed to fight off the monsters with giant robots known as Jaegers. These robots look to be expensive and resource-intensive and, in our times of…
Friends ended less than a decade ago, but it’s already a relic of a bygone era — a critically respected network sitcom that enjoyed massive ratings. That’s the central irony of the Must-See TV show’s legacy: It was one of the last programs to enjoy a national audience before cable…
As summer comic-book blockbusters go, The Wolverine is not as elephantine as it could have been. It’s more, well, wolverine — bony, loping, a little shaggy — and, blessedly, director James Mangold doesn’t get bogged down in mythology. You don’t need to diagram the convoluted relationships between Stan Lee and…
With an offhand precision that suggests he might prove one of his generation’s major actors, Michael Cera lays bare two specific human weaknesses in writer-director Sebastián Silva’s altered states/group dynamics road drama Crystal Fairy — weaknesses you’ll likely recognize from life rather than from other movies. The first is the…
Like first sex, writer-director Maggie Carey’s debut feature, The To Do List, is quick and messy, fitfully pleasurable, full of promise but not quite adept at getting everyone off. It’s an impossibly huge deal yet also a modest achievement, something we have to go through but that will no doubt…
Michael Cera is growing up. It may be hard to picture, as at one point it seemed as if baby-faced Cera could forever play the awkward teenage boy next door. But in the last few months, other than a recent return to his Arrested Development roots, Cera has left behind…
Before anybody even knew if 50 Shades of Grey would be made into a movie, there were bets being placed on who’d be a good fit to play the book’s main character, the infamous Christian Grey. The film’s producer, Dana Brunetti, announced last month that the movie’s set for release…
By Tab Sylvester Warning: This post contains spoilers. There are plenty of compelling reasons to watch Weeds creator Jenji Kohan’s new show Orange Is the New Black, the latest Netflix original series. But some of the comedy-drama’s most interesting scenes are also its steamiest. Not to mention the show’s cast…
There’s been plenty of speculation about who will be cast as the tall, dark, and handsome Christian Grey in the eventual (an official release date hasn’t been announced) movie. There are fake trailers featuring would-be leading men and women floating around the Internet, which have prompted some stars to publicly…
This morning, Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul and Neil Patrick Harris (a last-minute substitute for Kate Mara, who apparently had travel troubles) announced the nominees for the 65th annual Primetime Emmy Awards…
Incest, eyeball-gouging, interior decorating: If Only God Forgives is any indication, writer-director Nicolas Winding Refn is a man of many interests. He’s also put Kristin Scott Thomas in a blond wig and an assortment of cougar-mom outfits, which is either a plus or a minus, depending how you look at…
The world is full of lackluster movies. But the world is not full of Helen Mirren in a Marlene Dietrich fedora, or Helen Mirren in full-tilt eveningwear disposing of a bothersome corpse in a marble bathroom, or Helen Mirren firing a massive rifle-type thingie while sprawled on a picnic blanket…
There’s a gorgeous moment in Yoruba Richen’s documentary The New Black, currently playing the film festival circuit, in which two young black lesbian activists canvass an inner-city black neighborhood to drum up support for the gay marriage initiative that was on the ballot in Maryland’s 2012 statewide election. The women…
Adam Sandler is successful because he’s lazy. Not lazy in the sense that he has no ambition, or doesn’t want to work hard to maintain his status as America’s big-screen comedy king. But in the sense that Sandler has built an empire by doing the same things with the same…
Less funny than her worst SNL sketch, Girl Most Likely strands Kristen Wiig in a dreadful, disingenuous city-versus-suburbs comedy that mercilessly mocks New Jersey before turning around and celebrating its provincial trashiness over the hoity-toity snootiness of Manhattan. Fired from her job and dumped by her boyfriend, once-promising playwright Imogene…
Something like half the running time of the engaging new don’t-go-in-the-basement thriller The Conjuring is devoted to showing us characters proceeding slowly into the basement, or into the maws of basement-like places we know they shouldn’t go, often with just matches or a flashlight to guide them. Twice, deliciously, they’re…
In actual life, bureaucratic systems are the only workable state-citizen interface we’ve developed that can handle the sheer multitude of smelly, cranky humanity. In comedies, filmmakers often render the infinite and otherworldly in the mundane, human terms of bureaucracy, with all the waiting rooms, Muzak, and impossible regulatory complexities that…
Phoenix transplant Chris Cummings has set his newest horror movie venture in the Superstition Mountains with the Lost Dutchman tale as the catalyst for terror. He says the film focuses on four friends: the nice guy Adam, the jock dude Greg, his prissy girlfriend Laura, and her good-girl nursing student…
Ready or not, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo once again will invade the pop cultural consciousness tonight when the second season of the infamous reality program debuts on TLC. And if you’re one of the millions of viewers who plucked one of those “Watch ‘n’ Sniff” cards from the pages…
