A romance ripped from the pages of Deuteronomy, Frank Coraci’s Blended posits that the best reason for a woman with sons and a man with daughters to get married is that they can take care of each other’s kids. Quel pragmatisme! In the world of this sitcom love story, men…
On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, the Village Voice’s Alan Schestuhl and L.A. Weekly’s Amy Nicholson are joined by special guest Chris Klimek to discuss the strange career of Tom Cruise, the new X-Men movie, and why Han Solo should die. We close the show with a special phone…
Although the Mad Men storyline isn’t dependent on shock value as much as other popular TV shows, this season has been kicking it up with amputated nipples and drunken meltdowns. All of this madness seems to be building up to a full-blown breakdown, and we think Don Draper’s going to…
It’s not too often that locally made films get picked up and featured in a hoity-toity French film festival like Cannes, but the risqué subject matter of Tim McSpadden’s Love a la Carte might just be perfect for European audiences used to films like Blue is the Warmest Color, Irréversible,…
Godzilla is the movie monster with the mostest. King Kong may be just one gorilla-chest-hair behind, but not even the greatest of apes can quite match the half-dragon, half-dinosaur who first stomped and chomped his way through Tokyo in Ishiro Honda’s 1954 Toho Co, Ltd., extravaganza Godzilla. In that picture…
Looking for a chance to shout “Only in America”? Only in America — or an American movie — could the story of the first two Indian players to be signed to a major-league baseball team get spun as an L.A. sports agent’s journey toward realizing the importance of family and…
In 2014, any filmmaker who has a feel, and a flair, for romantic melodrama is doomed, and just one recent example from the world of blockbusters suggests why: In the final moments of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, the hero tragically fails to save a major character, but the moment, coming…
Chef, the back-to-his-roots indie flick from Jon Favreau (Iron Man), is to modern foodie culture as his own Swingers is to ’90s swing revival. Favreau plays Carl Casper, a culinary bad boy, barreling egotist, and divorced father with a chef’s knife tattoo stretching down his right forearm and “El Jefe”…
“This is the first generation that is expected to live shorter lives than their parents,” says Katie Couric, the narrator of Fed Up. It’s an infuriating statement given both the preventability of that outcome and the institutional opposition to the solutions, the primary conflict that drives the film. For the…
At first, before the murders, the story might sound like some nihilistic last-century tropical sitcom, what Sherwood Schwartz would have come up with if he’d been into Nietzsche. In 1929, German physician Friedrich Ritter, brain aflame with the promise of the superman, persuaded his lover, Dore Strauch, to abandon Berlin…
Greetings from Cannes! It’s an unwritten rule — maybe it should even be a written one — that no one who is lucky enough to come to Cannes for the film festival, now in its 67th year, should, in any way, shape, or form, complain about being here. But may…
Harrison Ford has been a good soldier in the Star Wars. He did whatever was asked of him by his commanding officer, George Lucas, even when his commanding officer was wrong. Now that Ford is back in Star Wars, and J.J. Abrams is running the show, Abrams’ first order of…
2014 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. & Legendary Pictures Productions LLCGodzilla, opening May 16.Village Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl and L.A. Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson recommend Neighbors (Seth Rogen, Rose Byrne, Zac Efron) and Godzilla (Bryan Cranston, Godzilla) and are joined by special guest, James Beard Award-winning L.A. Weekly restaurant…
Nicholas Stoller’s hilarious Neighbors splashes into summer with the satisfying swish-plop-hooray of a winning beer pong serve, making the director, who also wrote March’s Muppets Most Wanted, the first filmmaker in history to simultaneously have in theaters both a kiddie flick and an R-rated comedy where two men sword-fight with…
Although it’s based on the true story of the illegitimate daughter of a Royal Navy captain and an enslaved African woman, Amma Asante’s Belle’s richest inspiration comes from a painting. A 1779 double portrait hanging at Scone Palace in Scotland, it shows a pretty blond teenager decked out in typical…
Jason Baldwin had already been in prison for several years when his friend Mojo shook him awake at 2:30 one morning. “My first thought was, ‘I hope he’s not taking me for an escape, because I don’t want to get killed,'” Baldwin recalls. Instead, Mojo led him without explanation to…
Five years after her death, Vivian Maier is a superstar. An art world darling who might very well, were she alive, appreciate the attention her gorgeous portraiture is receiving. And who would likely not, if the secrecy with which she lived her life is any indication, be thrilled about our…
Stock up on snacks and dig up a cardigan, because this month you’re heading to the movies. Jackalope Ranch has rounded up five must-see flicks this May. From arty vampires and time-traveling mutants to the prime of Miss Lindsay Lohan, here’s what’s worth heading to the theater to watch…
Everything in the opening scenes of Jeremy Saulnier’s nerve-wracking revenge drama Blue Ruin is the color of a bruise, from the ocean to the bullet-hole-pocked 1996 Pontiac Bonneville that homeless near-mute Dwight (Macon Blair) calls home. It’s fitting. Dwight has never overcome the pain of his parents’ murder when he…
One of the great pleasures of regular moviegoing isn’t seeing great films. It’s finding the little oddballs, the modest entertainments that miss just as often as they hit, but leave you with the feeling that someone poured heart, soul, and a sense of humor into the work at hand. Fading…
Watching Kristen Wiig on Saturday Night Live, you maybe sometimes wondered if she was from outer space, perhaps some planet where women have big foreheads, tiny hands, and sing like chickens on helium. As sheltered housekeeper Johanna in Liza Johnson’s proudly frustrating Hateship Loveship — a pun on the emotions…
How much can you take away and still have a movie? Steven Knight’s Locke is an experiment in reducing contemporary screen storytelling to its irreducible essentials, which isn’t quite the same thing as being an “experimental” film, despite the ravishing early reviews from England. It shows us just one actor,…
