Michael Bay Injects Potent Absurdity Into Pain & Gain

Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg) believes life has cheated him. Doesn’t America promise riches and luxury to people who deserve it? He’s worked hard to build his body into a hulking knot of muscles; success should follow. But Lugo (the lead in Michael Bay’s neon-noir ode to Miami, muscle tone, and…

Shane Carruth Built Upstream Color; Now You Figure it Out

There’s a thin line between what’s truly mysterious and what’s totally bogus. A movie that leaves you feeling unclear about what’s happening isn’t necessarily mysterious — it may just be inept. In other words, the problem may be it, not you. Shane Carruth’s second feature, Upstream Color, a dystopian romance…

Tom Cruise Can Still Be Great — Why Aren’t His Movies?

Though he’s long been among the most recognizable celebrities in the world, Tom Cruise has always seemed vaguely irritating, like the popular kid at school everybody secretly dislikes. His is an odd sort of fame: Globally recognized but rarely acclaimed, he remains more reliably bankable than nearly any other actor…

Watching The Client List with a Real Sex Worker

In The Client List, Lifetime’s pseudo-steamy take on the world of sensual massage, Jennifer Love Hewitt plays a struggling housewife who takes a rub-down side job in order to support her kids after her husband disappears. The show, which jumps from scenes of Hewitt pleasuring executives to her dancing with…

It’s a Disaster Contradicts Its Title in Every Way

Perhaps the first great indie apocalypse potluck comedy, Todd Berger’s It’s a Disaster aces many of the fundamentals bobbled by too many of the films with which it shares DNA. Like dopey ol’ Cloverfield, this opens with get-to-know-the-cast party scenes (in this case, a sharply observed and performed couples’ brunch)…

How to Spot Hollywood’s Nonthreatening Black Man (NTBM)

Last week, America received two embarrassing reminders of its doting but asexual love for the Nonthreatening Black Man (NTBM). First, professional cowboy-hat-wearer Brad Paisley and Kangol connoisseur LL Cool J unintentionally trolled the entire Internet with “Accidental Racist,” a country song that argues that access to necklaces today totally makes…

The Sweet, Small Pleasures of Gimme the Loot

A big winner at last year’s SXSW, Gimme the Loot is a pocket-size Bronx indie with the wispiest of narrative ideas: A couple of teen graffiti bombers decide to gain fame by tagging the Mets’ Home Run Apple. Malcolm (Ty Hickson) and Sofia (Tashiana Washington) are mates only in spraying,…

Tom Cruise’s Oblivion Is Grand Until It’s Not

The good news: Here’s a lavish, serious science-fiction picture, one that on occasion transcends big-budget hit-making convention to glance against grandeur. Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion, based on his own graphic novel, is one of those futuristic puzzlers whose dramatic energies are most invested not in the characters or their fates, exactly,…

Rob Zombie Faces His Fans and His Art

After working a packed auditorium into a frenzy at last September’s première of Lords of Salem at the Toronto International Film Festival, Rob Zombie anxiously took his seat and watched his audience watch his film, his first independently financed feature. It’s also the first film he’s made following a messy…

Phoenix Film Festival Spotlight: Chris Eska’s The Retrieval

If the style of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and the themes in Django: Unchained could be fused together into one movie, it might look something like The Retrieval. Director, writer, and editor Chris Eska made the dark Civil War-era flick and it’s getting buzz all across the country, winning a…

42: Jackie Robinson Biopic Nearly Brings Its Hero to Life

A likable hagiography as nuanced as a plaque at the Cooperstown Hall of Fame, Brian Helgeland’s Jackie Robinson bio 42 finds a politic solution to the challenge Quentin Tarantino faced last year with Django Unchained: How to craft a crowd-pleasing multiplex period piece whose villain is, essentially, “all white people”?…

Room 237: Unlocking the Conspiracies Within Kubrick’s The Shining

Here’s the kind of theory that the five interviewees in Rodney Ascher’s Room 237 have come up with about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining: One believes that it’s an allegory about the genocide of Native Americans. Another that it’s instead about the Holocaust. Or that it’s Kubrick’s coded confession that he…

Roger Ebert: Why There Can Never Be Another

A common sentiment recurs through the abundance of eulogies and obituaries penned by film critics in the wake of his death late last week: Roger Ebert was an inspiration. It’s easy enough to be encouraged by another’s success — to regard an esteemed elder colleague with a combination of admiration…

Phoenix Film Festival Spotlight: Alev Aydin’s Lonely Boy

Everyone copes with tragedy differently. Actor Alev Aydin wrote Lonely Boy after experiencing the effects brain cancer had on his mother, which resulted in symptoms similar to schizophrenia. His film, in which he also plays the lead as Franky, explores the hardship of having that mental illness while trying to…