If you’re looking to flex your filmmaking muscles or catch some of the Valley’s up-and-coming movie talent, look no further than the Almost Famous Film Festival. The local nonprofit, founded by brothers Jae and Kai Staats, is celebrating its 10th year in challenging local film teams to make movies in…
The single-screen cinema, with its balconies and ushers and double features, has joined vaudeville and silent pictures in our hazy American memory. And yet those of us intent on sanctimonious navel-gazing must whine, occasionally, about the good old days, when one saw two carefully paired feature-length films and a couple…
For Robert Redford, Sundance’s opening day was a bummer. He woke up to learn the Academy had snubbed him for a (deserved) Best Actor nod for the sparse yachting drama All Is Lost, and he had to spend his typically triumphant morning press conference swatting down questions about being sad…
While our ingenues scurry toward teen bestsellers and David O. Russell flicks, here’s the next generation of talented leading men swaggering into a dude-bro Sex and the City. At night, best friends played by Zac Efron, Miles Teller, and Michael B. Jordan — a.k.a. the player, the goof, and the…
A favorite pastime of critics and serious filmgoers — perhaps the most idiotic and fruitless one — is to complain about how bad the movies have gotten. The complaint is meaningless, because no matter how “bad” the movies get, there are always actors. There’s no such thing as a golden…
On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, this paper’s film critics kick things off with something of a “potpourri segment,” to borrow a phrase from Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl. Echoing a common sentiment in the movie world, Scherstuhl describes the month of January as a “grim, featureless landscape…that long,…
Quick, somebody check Jason Reitman’s house to see if the real man has been turned into dust by a body snatcher. Though his name’s on the poster, it’s impossible to believe that the sardonic boy wonder of Juno, Thank You for Smoking, and Young Adult would direct this stilted romance…
For some, the first things that come to mind when thinking of gay cinema are films like Brokeback Mountain and Blue Is the Warmest Color. While these flicks have their merits, they barely scratch the surface of LGBT film. The fifth annual Desperado Film Festival is here to broaden viewers’…
Let’s start with the ending: the closing credits disclaimer that insists that none of the lead actors in Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac filmed penetrative sex. If there is real sex in the movie, and it sure looks like there is, it must have been done by one of the eight…
The publicity campaign for Big Bad Wolves, a nasty little revenge thriller from Israeli filmmakers Navot Papushado and Aharon Keshales, quotes Quentin Tarantino’s decree that it’s the “best film of the year.” Tarantino saw Big Bad Wolves at last year’s Busan Film Festival, where he reportedly showed up at a…
Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi solidifies his status as one of cinema’s finest living dramatists with The Past, a superb follow-up to 2011’s Oscar-winning A Separation that again situates audiences amid interpersonal, familial, and household crises. Working from a script that incisively plumbs a thicket of logistical and emotional complications, Farhadi’s…
New Zealand stuntwoman-turned-actress Zoë Bell is fully aware of her unique position as an action star who also does her own stunts. After working as Lucy Lawless’ stunt double on Xena: Warrior Princess, Bell was discovered by Quentin Tarantino on the set of Kill Bill. After that, Bell has enjoyed…
So many ideas in our country begin with the best of intentions and end up completely corrupted. From Lindsay Lohan’s acting career to the once-noble filibuster, well-meaning stuff sometimes just gets out of hand here. But has it caught up with Kickstarter, too? Launched in 2009, this crowd-funding platform seemed,…
There are four good things we can say about I, Frankenstein, another muscles-and-rubble comic book adaptation just un-terrible enough not to alienate its core audience, yet never consistently grand or surprising enough to win over anyone else. First, Aaron Eckhart brings it, scowling like a champ beneath his jigsawed scar…
The Sundance InstituteEvery Sundance there’s a crowd-pleaser, and most years it’s got one degree of separation from the Little Miss Sunshine crew. But the most delightful flick of the 2014 fest is an unconventional documentary with no plot, no dialogue, and nothing but party. Living Stars, a fleet 63-minute film…
Pamela Smart, the sexpot schoolteacher who seduced three teenage boys to shoot her husband, has been imprisoned without parole since 1991. Her official release year is sometime in 9999, assuming that human civilization is still alive. Yet the captive in Jeremiah Zagar’s Captivated: The Trials of Pamela Smart isn’t her…
© Courtesy of Sundance InstituteSixty years ago, Fred Flintstone hawked Winston cigarettes. Today, he pitches cereal. And both can kill. Stephanie Soechtig’s rabble-rousing documentary Fed Up argues that it’s time to attack Big Sugar just like we successfully demonized Big Tobacco. Narrated by Katie Couric, Fed Up is the first…
© Beth Dubber, Courtesy of Sundance InstituteKristen Stewart in Camp X-Ray.Kristen Stewart spent five Twilight films getting rescued by werewolves and vampires. Consider Camp X-Ray her rebuttal to a half-decade of playing damsels in distress. As Guantanamo guard Private Cole, Stewart is punched, bloodied, and spat on — and that’s…
If it were the late ’70s, and you were a wunderkind film artist a bit embarrassed about your zeal for space-opera kids’ stuff, you went out and bagged yourself a great to class your movie up: Alec Guinness; François Truffaut; Max von Sydow done up like a disco gladiolus. That…
“You are The Man?” a crook asks Ice Cube as the cop comedy Ride Along opens. “I am the man!” Cube insists. You can’t blame him for being defensive. Now a 44-year-old father of five, Cube is three decades away from the furious teenager who co-founded N.W.A. his senior year…
Russians still make the best movie villains. Since 9/11, Hollywood has been queasy about giving us fictional baddies from Arab countries — the line between cheap stereotypes and real-life religious extremism is too blurry, too delicate. South American drug lords have had their day, and Albanians in bad sweaters just…
One of the best performances of the year was from the tiny lifeboat in Captain Phillips.On Thursday, this year’s Oscar nominations will be announced, also known as national Gah! What Were Those Idiot Voters Thinking Day. We can’t wait, so in the meantime, we give you this:…
