There’s a scene in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby in which Leonardo DiCaprio’s hyper-rich, super-awkward Jay Gatsby takes it upon himself to redecorate the bachelor pad of his less-prosperous friend, Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire). Gatsby’s old flame, Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan), is coming to Nick’s house for tea. Eager to…
Farm films blow up human drama to mythic, big-sky terms in which the world itself is represented by a character’s land, hard-earned and easily lost. Vast landscapes, both psychic and literal, are threatened by unstoppable outside forces. Kind of like zombie movies, farm films are vast canvases for directors to…
For At Any Price Director Ramin Bahrani, Bigger Films Demand Bigger Targets
Responding to the uproar in April over the passage — and President Obama’s signage — of the so-called “Monsanto Protection Act,” the gene-bending agri-giant Monsanto issued a press release dismissing any attendant conspiracy theories as “worthy of a B-grade movie script.” They got it half right. Immediate in its politics…
The supreme testament to Hitchcock is that no matter how many years pass, his work exerts an ever-stronger influence. Just last month came Park Chan-Wook’s reimagining of Shadow of a Doubt, Stoker, and last year Anthony Hopkins did Hitchcock as a Hitchcock character in Hitchcock — and let’s not forget…
One of the most beguiling of the many stories all knotted up in Salman Rushdie’s brilliant, baggy, exhausting 1981 novel Midnight’s Children concerns a lovelorn doctor, his beautiful patient, and that timeless exemplar of old-world prudishness: a sheet with a hole in it. The patient, Naseem, not yet of marriageable…
In the course of reviewing movies in the early 2000s, just as computer-generated special effects were becoming radically sophisticated and also were, increasingly, becoming the chief selling point of big-ticket movies, I more and more often found myself invoking the name “Ray Harryhausen.” He died on Tuesday, May 7, at…
In his new film, the social drama At Any Price, director and co-writer Ramin Bahrani examines how the transformation of food into intellectual property through seed patents has corrupted, impoverished, or dissolved the American family farm. As with the Iranian-American director’s previous films (Man Push Cart, Chop Shop, Goodbye Solo),…
The title promises something rarefied and heady, but The We and the I, Michel Gondry’s shaggy, roving social study, is grounded in home truth. If you’ve been to high school, you know all about it: The dreaded “we” that tends to form vicious clusters — in the cafeteria, the smoke…
Has anyone ever been so perfectly cast as Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused? Sculpted entirely of charisma and cheekbones yet still seedier than a stash of gym-locker pot, McConaughey’s radiant stoner exemplified high school promise gone bad. he looked like the little man of top of trophies, just horny,…
Uwe Boll will no longer fight you — at least, not with his fists. Often lambasted by critics as the worst of the worst, Boll once literally got into the boxing ring with four film bloggers, but these days prefers to combat negative press with what he claims are more…
“It was 1991. I fly into L.A. I take a cab to Compton. On the phone, Richard [Williams] said, ‘The only thing I guarantee you, you won’t get shot,’ ” says tennis coach Rick Macci. “I thought he was kidding.” Macci was meeting with Williams and his two young daughters, Venus…
The only thing we English teachers hate more than Sparknotes is a high-quality, mostly faithful movie version of a book. Why would a student slog through Pride and Prejudice when she can drool over Colin Firth in the excellent BBC miniseries? And shh! Don’t tell the eighth-graders about Gregory Peck’s…
One of the more infamous figures in the Valley’s rave scene and local party monster lore has resurfaced in the media recently after being featured on the popular National Geographic Channel reality show Locked Up Abroad. Shaun Attwood, the British-born gentleman who was the onetime kingpin of a massive local…
This summer has an abundance of noteworthy films coming out and quite a few that might not be worth the cost of admission. Jackalope Ranch is here to help guide you through the movie madness with five must see indie flicks that should go mainstream and five more that can…
Season five of RuPaul’s Drag Race is one of the most dramatic seasons to date. Unlike previous seasons, there was no clear winner from the get-go. We had a feeling Sharon Needles and Raja were going to win, and we’re still disappointed that Tyra Sanchez beat out Raven and Jujubee…
After perusing the prolific amounts of art, jewelry, and clothing this weekend at First Friday, take a break and escape the heat to catch a controversially classic book’s second film adaptation by director Michael Radford. Bookmans presents the latest feature in its Banned Books on Film series, with the polarizing…
Where has Robert Downey Jr. gone? There’s no doubt he’s the star of Iron Man 3; he sprints through the picture like a neurotic panther. And yet he’s absent, detached in a Zen-like way from the whole affair. The nakedness that defines his best performances — in any role, up…
“The meek shall inherit the Earth,” somebody said once — probably Truffaut. Two pictures into his thrilling career, writer-director Antonio Campos seems determined to show us that might not be anything to celebrate. Campos’ debut, 2008’s Afterschool, was essentially one part Blow Up to three parts Rushmore-as-psychological-horror-flick. While it took…
Would you sign on for three months in shark-infested waters on a tippy raft under a captain who can’t swim? The shrewdest joke in Kon-Tiki’s surefire story — about Thor Heyerdahl’s 4,000-mile South Pacific expedition to prove that ocean-faring Incans could have settled Tahiti — is that practically every character…
Just as Mad Men charms its viewers by using sex, drugs, snappy banter, and pretty people to make heavy topics (sexism, racism, dreams diffused) palatable, the editors of Mad Men, Mad World trust that some TV glamour will get readers interested in digesting academic theories. It’s not wrong. Full of…
Stephanie Zacharek is the new chief film critic at the Village Voice. Alan Scherstuhl is the Voice’s film editor. Sometimes they gab about how the review-sausage gets made. To: Stephanie Zacharek From: Alan Scherstuhl Hi, Stephanie, welcome again to the Voice! Like you, I found myself worn out by Iron…
Iron Man 3 has opened. For some viewers, the film’s appeal isn’t the eponymous superhero, but the sarcastic-yet-sensitive hero behind the gravity-defying, repulsor-ray-shooting suit of armor. I refer, of course, to Shane Black. Iron Man 3’s co-writer/director recharged the buddy-cop flick in the ’80s with his screenplay for Lethal Weapon…
