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, vampires, and superheroes so passionate about their abstinence?” That Twilight hunk and Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man have won tween hearts and Hollywood billions by cavalierly refusing to…
Does anyone care about John McClane anymore? That’s not the same as asking whether you want to see A Good Day to Die Hard, the fifth in this series of films with increasingly outlandish action — and increasingly cumbersome titles. The most recent entry — the slick, ridiculous hit, Live…
Abbas Kiarostami is preoccupied with my tape recorder. He wonders whether it’s too far away from where he’s sitting. He makes his translator switch from one side of him to another so that the recorder is between them. After a while, clearly still anxious about it, he picks it up…
Before anything else, here’s how dumb things get in A Good Day for Die Hard, which is being sold as a bang-bang movie sequel so that nobody catches onto its true nature: a black-ops experiment testing the human faculty for discovering coherent patterns in unrelated shards of image. Late in…
If Sundance signals the annual launch of American indie cinema’s new product line, the 63-year-old Berlin Film Festival (February 7-17) offers the year’s first major look at what the rest of the world has to offer. In addition to the 19-film official competition — this year presided over by jury…
Internet assholes are always yelling about what Lena Dunham doesn’t wear on Girls, but let’s talk about something she does. Bros who think everything should be marketed to them never get tired of pointing out that Dunham’s Hannah Horvath seems to be topless more often than not, a point of…
Those who enjoy film director Wes Anderson’s visual style, witty dialouge, and sepia-soaked color schemes — well, they just get it. Some people, actually a lot of people, don’t. There’s very little middle ground on the subject, which is why he might not be a natural choice to direct commercials…
Set in East Germany in 1980, Christian Petzold’s superb Barbara is a transfixing Cold War thriller made even more vivid by its subtle overlay of the golden-era “woman’s picture,” the woman in question being Dr. Barbara Wolff, brilliantly played by Nina Hoss in her fifth film with the writer-director. Yet…
Just a week or so after the Pentagon reversed its ban on allowing female soldiers into combat, here’s another breakthrough, of a sort: The funniest scenes in the confused and shaggy comedy Identity Thief are of Melissa McCarthy and Jason Bateman beating the hell out of each other. McCarthy —…
If Side Effects, an immensely pleasurable thriller centering on psychotropic drugs, really is Steven Soderbergh’s final big-screen film, as the director claims it will be, then he has peaked in the Valley of the Dolls. Scripted by Scott Z. Burns, who also wrote the screenplay for Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011), Side…
To watch Melissa McCarthy as lovable chef Sookie St. James on seven seasons of the Gilmore Girls was to see an actress perfect the art of playing a sidekick. As best friend of the show’s protagonist, Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham), McCarthy dutifully provided comic relief and a shoulder on which…
“I’ve been lucky in that I’ve always worked with writers whose voices are so specific that there really isn’t any way to recalibrate things without them being intimately involved,” says Steven Soderbergh as he swivels in a chair in the happily cluttered Flatiron District loft space that doubles as his…
Load up on your snack of choice, bucko. You have some movies to see. Here are five flicks and festivals you don’t want to miss this month. Bloody Hero International Film Festival @ Phoenix Center for the Arts Sounds like a horror fest, but don’t let the “bloody” party of…
From time to time, Zach Fowle will provide a visual guide to every day and extraordinary situations … and (because he has bad handwriting) Claire Lawton will illustrate them. Welcome to Charted Territory. Lena Dunham’s coming-of-age in New York drama-comedy has made headlines for nudity, drawn criticism for diversity, and…
Who can truly be satisfied only watching the trailer of a film before it’s released. For true film buffs this only adds to the longing and desire to get to the multiplex on release day (with tickets purchased in advance, of course). But why wait? Instead, get the jump on…
Here’s something you don’t get to say too often: It’s a shame when Paul McCartney turns up. Before McCartney arrives, rasping, puppy-eyed, and eager to have a go at the hot new grunge sound of 1993, Dave Grohl’s Sound City is an exciting, sometime illuminating documentary about how a squad…
Steven Spielberg and his jaunty little apologue about the 16th president of the United States aside, it’s no longer enough in movies for a historical figure or literary character to do simple stuff like abolish slavery or find a man of intelligence and character. Abraham Lincoln is reduced to slaying…
Being a lucky guy, I’ve been kicked in the balls only once. How did it rate on the comedy scale? Well, it was funnier than a monologue by Chelsea Handler, but not quite as hilarious as my last screening for colorectal cancer. Yet despite the fact that this act hurts…
The Great Director Walter Hill Brings a Bullet (and Ideas) to Your Head “It’s hard to get these things started,” says Walter Hill, the dean of the American action movie, speaking to me from Los Angeles. “Action films are, by their very nature, more expensive than what are sometimes called,…
Please, for his own good, somebody clap Dustin Hoffman into a chastity belt. Based on what Al Pacino suffers in Stand Up Guys, and the identical humiliations visited up Robert De Niro in Little Fockers, it seems that Hollywood will not be satisfied until it has speared a hypodermic into…
Tabu is one of those truly unique movies you can get tongue-tied just trying to describe: a tragic pop pastiche? A lyrical Old Hollywood melodrama projected on a bedsheet? A celluloid curio à la Barnum’s Fiji mermaid? At such times, it’s better to stick with a simple “wonderful.” Although the…
The end is nigh. 30 Rock-aholics will say farewell to Tina Fey’s sitcom when its one-hour season finale airs on January 31. The two-parter is the last installment of farty nerd goddess Liz Lemon’s adventures, and it promises guest appearances from Salma Hayek, Julianne Moore, T-Pain, and Nancy Pelosi, among…
