We’ve all been there. You finally get around to watching this year’s nominees, and you think, “Didn’t I see pretty much this same Oscar-bait movie last year?” You probably did, thanks to the McKee/Weinstein-driven formula behind most Best Picture noms. You can even build your own! Just mix and match…
Grown-ups may wince, but Paul Dalio’s earnest, ambitious manic-poet romance Touched With Fire is a gift to the young and passionately creative, to the brains-a-poppin’ kids caught up in invention and each other and the invention of each other. You don’t have to be bipolar to get caught up yourself…
A laugh comes at last just before the end credits of Robert Eggers’ lit-class horror-bummer The Witch: a boastful note attesting to the documentary truthfulness of the dialogue in the movie we’ve just seen. Over 90 minutes that prove shriekiness is no impediment to ponderousness, we’ve beheld the harrowing of…
A legitimate stunner in that word’s truest sense, Colombian director Ciro Guerra’s river-trip Embrace of the Serpent mesmerizes and jacks with you, leaving you not quite certain, at its end, how to go about the rest of your day. The film is beautiful and ferocious, calm and torrential, a plunge…
On the surface, there isn’t much to object to in How to Be Single. Look, it says! No matter how fabulous their lives may seem, everyone wants to be happier and more fulfilled. Everyone is looking for something more, just like you! And really, Christian Ditter’s film (based on the…
Frills-free versions of You’ve Got Mail, Pretty Woman, and Love Actually.
HBO’s Vinyl is the latest in a series of cultural hard-ons for the rough-and-tumble world of pre-Koch NYC: From novels like Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers and Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire to online photo galleries of graffiti-splattered subway trains and can-you-believe-this-juice-bar-used-to-be-a-crack-den slideshows, there’s a hunger for what Manhattan looked,…
The first Zoolander, Ben Stiller’s dopey, fitfully funny fashion spoof, was released less than three weeks after the September 11 attacks. Its sequel shows the extent to which another kind of nefarious plot — the cynical quest for world domination through cross-brand synergy — has proven impossible to eradicate on…
Valentine’s Day can trigger a range of emotions depending on your relationship status. It can make you painfully aware that you’re single or happy that you’ve found your sweetheart. (But we all get candy. So that rules.) Either way, there’s one fictional couple that’ll have you feeling grateful for where you’re at…
“I’ve turned into this kind of crazy optimist,” Michael Moore admits in his new documentary Where to Invade Next, his first film in six years. At 61, the gadfly savant has mellowed. Instead of charging into rooms, he shuffles, the American flag wrapped around his shoulders like a grandmother’s shawl…
A guy I grew up with had the superpower to make anything dirty. No matter what you’d say to him, he’d manage to make it about his dick, or about anal sex, or about how girls — so he had heard — smelled like fish. I asked him what he…
The biggest story at this year’s Sundance Film Festival was the record-breaking bidding war for The Birth of a Nation, a prestige biopic about rebellious slave Nat Turner. When Fox Searchlight snatched it for $17.5 million — $5 million more than any other flick in the festival’s history — their…
You’re probably right if you think you might get a couple laughs out of a movie titled Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. You’re also right if you’ve guessed that this gung-ho but cruddy-looking mashup fails from A to Z: It’s neither good Austen nor good zombie flick. But in those…
A kick for those who’ve distractedly thumbed through Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, Joel and Ethan Coen’s bustling comedy Hail, Caesar! looks back to the waning days of moviedom’s golden age: specifically, to 1951, when big-studio fixers were still tidying up the messes left by the talent (scrubbing now done by…
In 1995, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was shot after attending a public rally. Rushed to the hospital, he died hours later. His assassin, Israeli ultranationalist Yigal Amir, is in prison for life, having achieved his goal: Without Rabin, the tentative Palestinian-Israeli peace process collapsed. Where’s the story in an…
It’s time to buckle down, you hopeless romantic, you. Perhaps you missed your shot at popping the question over Christmas because of a family fight over the merits of Donald Trump’s campaign. On New Year’s Eve, you couldn’t get an Uber and missed the dinner reservation where they were holding…
Patrick Warburton is that rare voice actor who looks like he sounds. His imposing, muscular physique complements his deep basso voice, but his warm tone gives a touch of soul to his many memorable performances as lunkheaded alpha males. Quite likely your ears perk up when you hear him. He…
Jane Got a Gun’s reputation precedes it, but it shouldn’t define it. After a tortured production that included the departure of original director Lynne Ramsay (Morvern Callar, We Need to Talk About Kevin) and a revolving door of leading men, the Western arrives in theaters long after popular opinion declared…
The queasiest thing about American Crime Story’s (FX) retelling of the 1995 O.J. Simpson murder trial is how easily such a flagrant miscarriage of justice could happen all over again. The twin forces that most warped that case, after all, still plague us today: a tabloid culture that reduces flesh-and-blood…
Phoenix in February — what’s not to love? It’s a great month to show some affection for the outdoors — and there are plenty of options for doing just that. You could spend an evening finding constellations, enjoy an outdoor movie, or get in on a neon nighttime run that…
It’s around 8 p.m. on Wednesday, January 27, and there’s a pretty decent crowd picking through the heavily discounted selection at Video Paradise in Chandler. The adults-only section is hidden behind a bright blue wall; two guys look around nervously before going in. Just around the corner is a staff…
In 1961, Dwight Eisenhower famously left the White House with a warning to the American public about the rise of the military-industrial complex. When Barack Obama exits the Oval Office next year, he wouldn’t be remiss in cautioning the nation about the conspiracy-industrial complex, which has dug its tentacles into…
