The funniest and most incisive show on television is ending this week — so let’s look back at how it began. On October 17, 2005, a power-suited Stephen Colbert furrowed his eyebrows and showed off highlights of his new set. Red letters above him shouted, “The Colbert Report.” The title…
TV continued to unmoor from its origins and transform into something else this year. No longer tethered to a specific appliance, a particular kind of storytelling, or even commercial concerns, “television” now feels like an increasingly obsolete word. But that’s a discussion for another time, for we’ve come to celebrate…
The funniest and most incisive show on television is ending this week — so let’s look back at how it began. On October 17, 2005, a power-suited Stephen Colbert furrowed his eyebrows and showed off highlights of his new set. Red letters above him shouted, “The Colbert Report.” The title…
Editor’s Note: Sony has officially canceled the theatrical release of The Interview following terrorist threats against theaters, and the announcement that several major theater chains had opted not to exhibit the film. The following review was written before Sony pulled The Interview– and stands as a reminder that world-shaking art…
Before worrying ourselves over its qualities as an adaptation, or its findings as an experiment in just how much tumpety-tump parump-pa-bump the human mind can endure, let’s take a moment to marvel that Rob Marshall’s Into the Woods even exists — as a PG from Disney, no less! No matter…
There’s something curiously airless about director Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken, the story of real-life Olympian and WWII P.O.W. Louis Zamperini. Early on, Louis (Jack O’Connell) and his fellow American soldiers are zipping through the golden skies, dogfighting with Japanese planes, and, though the B-24’s doors are open and the wind is…
What kind of circle is time again? A year after blowing the doors off our annual critics’ poll, golden boy Matthew McConaughey won just a single vote for his turn in the loudest movie of the year, Christopher Nolan’s tears-in-space effort Interstellar, which has tied with the unprescient Transcendence as…
Despite its sumptuous displays of feudal opulence — cavalries, silk gowns, all the naked female extras money can buy — Netflix’s Marco Polo feels distinctly like scraps. Turgid, fatuous, and humorless, the streaming site’s newest series is a grave miscalculation of what has made Game of Thrones, its obvious model,…
The biggest laugh I heard from the audience at my screening of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies came from seven words in the end credits: “Based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien.” Just picture that tweedy Oxford philologist nodding in pleased approval at this adaptation of his…
The thing about hating your job and not giving a shit is that it can happen to anyone, anytime — it might even explain the longueurs late in most two-term presidencies. In Talya Lavie’s bored, biting comedy Zero Motivation, aggrieved ennui hits right in the heart of the Intifada. Not…
The original Broadway Annie was a kiddie musical that wasn’t for kids. It was a period piece about the Great Depression — both a hooray for Warbucksian success and an elbow-jab making clear that rich folk need to share — with a detour into a Hooverville and a key cameo…
We begin this week’s Voice Film Club podcast with a Thomas Pynchon story, before hosts Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice, and Amy Nicholson of LA Weekly, move onto Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie adaption of his novel, Inherent Vice. It’s “in some ways a godawful mess, indulgent…
If we’re honest with ourselves, the teaser-trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens looks better than the original Star Wars movies. That’s how this week’s Voice Film Club podcast opens, with your hosts Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice and Amy Nicholson of LA Weekly…
Bill Cosby’s present is secure. Despite the 17 women (so far) who have publicly come forward with notably similar allegations of drug-enabled sexual assault, the comedian received standing ovations for his stand-up performances in the Bahamas and in Florida recently. His comeback tour likely will continue over the next few…
Hospitals are depressing. Until recently, medical shows glossed over this basic fact of life by focusing on the most glamorous clique within them: doctors. For the past two decades, the upwardly mobile audience identification integral to most TV shows taught us to look away from the bedpans and sheaves of…
“Politics really isn’t my specialty,” shrugs Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) to a naval commander (Charles Dance) in an early job interview scene in Morten Tyldum’s choppy biopic The Imitation Game. Yet no less than Winston Churchill would credit Turing as the main cause of the Allies’ victory over the Nazis…
Whatever it is Americans want out of life — and it’s not even something we can precisely define ourselves — it was nowhere in evidence on December 3, when a grand jury failed to indict the police officer whose chokehold killed Eric Garner in July. We all know we live…
Whatever it is Americans want out of life — and it’s not even something we can precisely define ourselves — it was nowhere in evidence on December 3, when a grand jury failed to indict the police officer whose chokehold killed Eric Garner in July. We all know we live…
Welcome to December, a.k.a. awards season, when the movie studios release their best and brightest and Benedictiest into the wild (including, ahem, Wild) and onto cineplex screens across the country. Here’s what to head to the theater for this month, from likely blockbusters and breakthroughs to indies and what might…
Garfield creator Jim Davis is well aware of the internet’s cat obsession. In fact, he’s got an upcoming strip about it. “But if I told you the joke, I’d have to kill you,” he deadpans, before cracking his paternal composure with a chuckle. (He did tell me, and I’ve chosen…
If we’re honest, most of us who relish a good horror film don’t actually hope to feel something like horror. The appeal is, instead, that of shock and surprise, all candied up, the crowd-pleasing bits staged with the kind of extended setup/payoff patience that the makers of comedies have long…
For reasons that are perhaps understandable, stories about women finding themselves — or their voices, or their inner courage, or any number of things that are apparently very easy to mislay — are big business. But even if Cheryl Strayed’s hugely successful 2012 memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on…
