Photo by Jaap BuitendijkChiwetel Ejiofor in 12 Years a Slave.On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, Village Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl and L.A. Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson disagree on Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave — a beautifully shot film, contrasting the all-too-visible evil of mankind…
If you like going out to movies on Wednesday night and need a group of friends, the Phoenix Movie Bears are ready and willing to join you in the fold. Originally founded as a social group for gay men who identify as bears, PMB has expanded its reach over the…
The inability to have a child is often treated as a “white people problem,” the province of middle- and upper-class couples who end up resorting to expensive fertility treatments. But Andrew Dosunmu’s supple, observant drama Mother of George puts a different spin on the issue: A woman who longs for…
African-born filmmaker Andrew Dosunmu’s Mother of George takes place in Brooklyn, but it might as well be set on another continent — or even planet. The story of a Nigerian couple trying to conceive a baby in New York, this visually evocative feature appropriates the intricately patterned textiles, blue and…
What’s illegal at Disneyland? Dogs, drugs, alcohol, pamphlets, flags and large coolers. Not listed? Secretly shooting a feature-length movie. But Disneyland couldn’t have imagined director Randy Moore would have the courage to film Escape From Tomorrow on location — and that it would be so horny. In the black-and-white theme…
Kimberly Peirce changes almost nothing in her rallying remake of Brian De Palma’s classic about a troubled telekinetic teenager. She doesn’t have to. Yes, now the mean girls who pelt Carrie with tampons upload a cell phone video of the attack, and the well-meaning jock who squires the school outcast…
The cast of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, the previous Jane Austen modernization from producers Bernie Su and Hank GreenBernie Su and Hank Green captured the hearts, iPhones, Pinterest pages, Instagram accounts, and GetGlue music playlists of teens across America with their 2012 series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, which updated Pride…
Perhaps the best and worst thing about young teenagers is that they’re capable of what George W. Bush fans used to call “great moral clarity.” In HBO’s sure-to-make-you-bawl documentary Valentine Road, Aliyah, a student at E.O. Green Junior High School in Oxnard, California, breaks down the differences between gayness and…
Something’s seemed different about number-one American action hero Bruce Willis lately. His action movie output in recent years has mostly been stunt casting in mediocre sequels (The Expendables 2, G.I. Joe: Retaliation), or supporting roles in little-seen B-movies (Setup, Catch .44, Fire with Fire), as if he’s in a who-can-co-star-with-50-Cent-the-most…
I’m pretty sure the dumbest way to die is killing yourself upon discovering that faking your own death has tricked your forbidden lover into his or her own suicide. The second might be to get gutted in one of the jumbled, perfunctory sword fights that clang up the streets of…
Tom Hanks has built a career out of playing aggressively noble roles, so it’s only natural to want to see him taken down a peg. But it’s no fun to watch him suffer at the hands of Somali pirates in Paul Greengrass’ true-life adventure Captain Phillips. Hanks plays the commander…
“After 40, you have to choose between your ass or your face,” one offscreen spin-class participant remarks to her fellow affluent fitness enthusiasts within the first minute of writer-director Stacie Passon’s poorly conceived Concussion. The remark is a paraphrase of a quote attributed to Catherine Deneuve, and the first of…
During his 2012 presidential campaign, Republican candidate Herman Cain rhapsodized about the fence he’d build on the U.S.-Mexico border: 20 feet tall with barbed wire, electricity, and a moat. “And I would put those alligators in that moat!” he cheered. For Machete Kills, Robert Rodriguez built that fence but left…
CBGB begins with a bit of misdirection. You think punk started at 315 Bowery. You’re wrong. It began in a basement in Connecticut with two ne’er-do-wells, John Holmstrom and Legs McNeil. There, according to the film — a mostly turgid, boring-as-hell, campy slog that gets more wrong than right —…
There definitely are some geeks out there who are worried about Zero Charisma. Does the movie take a lot of cheap shots or does it for once accurately show what it’s like to be a geek? Zero Charisma is more of a nuanced character study than a broad comedy, and…
© 2013 – Troublemaker StudiosTrejo in Machete Kills.In this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, our critics discuss Captain Phillips and Machete Kills, both out on Friday, October 11…
The Birthday Boys with executive producer Bob Odenkirk (center)An actor’s unique look can accentuate any comedy performance. On an August Sunday afternoon at a private home in Sherman Oaks, California, Tim Kalpakis, a member of sketch group the Birthday Boys, with a Dick Tracy–square jaw, is prepping a bit as…
GravityOn this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, the Village Voice’s Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek both praise Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (starring George Clooney and Sandra Bullock), saying the director exhibits a “lovely human touch” with film, which is set in space, and that it’s “so different than anything else he’s…
“What a shitty place to die.” Whatever your feelings about Dallas, that’s a pretty harsh assessment. Then again, the character in Peter Landesman’s well-intentioned but unfulfilling Parkland who says it, an aide to fallen President John F. Kennedy, can probably be forgiven for his snotty Yankee attitude. Next month marks…
In their experimental new film, Metallica endeavor to translate the anger and pain in their music into a visual medium. Directed by Nimród Antalis, Metallica Through the Never is the band’s second big-screen effort, the first being being the 2004 behind-the-scenes documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster. That debut, created…
Some movies are so tense and deeply affecting that they shave years off your life as you’re watching, only to give back that lost time, and more, at the end. Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity is one of those movies. Sandra Bullock and George Clooney play astronauts — one a medical engineer,…
Like all kid protagonists in movies, Wadjda’s Wadjda wants one pure thing so much that the very concept of want shades into need. If this plucky Saudi Arabian girl (played by preteen Waad Mohammed) doesn’t get a bicycle, it seems, some fundamental quality of hers might not survive adolescence. Her…
