Nima Nourizadeh’s American Ultra is a bloody valentine attached to a bomb. It’s violent, brash, inventive, and horrific, and perhaps the most romantic film of the year. Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart star as Mike and Phoebe, two West Virginia stoners blissed out on weed and each other. “We’re the…
An opening line can make or break a movie, but there are times when a clunker shouldn’t be held against an otherwise sweet, well-observed picture. Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini’s Ten Thousand Saints starts with a dud, rendered in voiceover: “I’ve heard people say that life is like a…
Brooke, Greta Gerwig’s latest Manhattan creation, is a hurricane gobbling up lives. She’s a singer, restaurateur, interior decorator, math coach, spinning instructor, and self-described autodidact. When 18-year-old admirer Tracy (Lola Kirke), Brooke’s sister-to-be following their parents’ Thanksgiving wedding, squeaks that she wants to write short stories, Brooke devours that idea,…
Looking for something to do this week without spending some of your hard-earned money? We can help. Free is one of our favorite four-letter words, and this week we found five no-cost events in the Valley this week that are sure to pique your interest. Wether you’re looking for something…
In a world gone mad for superhero movies, what chance does the light spy caper have? Audiences will put total faith in a guy wearing a red metal suit, but the soft woolen folds of the bespoke kind barely register. When a whole city can be blasted to smithereens thanks…
From the trailer, and just from its initial vibe, Joel Edgerton’s directorial debut, The Gift, looks like your stock “When bad things happen to good people” thriller, complete with a soulful pet dog you just know is going to get it. But dog lovers, and everyone else, should know that Edgerton (who…
In the holy trinity of N.W.A., each icon had a power: Dr. Dre produced, Ice Cube wrote the words, and Eazy-E was the comic relief. N.W.A.’s biopic, Straight Outta Compton, blurs those roles. Both Dre and Cube produced the film and seem to have edited the script with a red…
Promising and disappointing all at once, Jon Watts’ backroads thriller Cop Car heralds the arrival of a significant director, one adept not just at the usual action and suspense but also at the fleet, affecting depiction of lives as they’re actually lived. In the opening scenes, the camera glides alongside…
The Aristocrats Best of Enemies toasts Vidal and Buckley’s televised insult comedy. Even if you’re the sort who believes there can be no such thing as too much political coverage, it can’t hurt to cast a fond glance back to 1968, when only three networks — NBC, CBS, and the…
Less than a generation ago, Yonkers, New York, became the face of segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation in my backyard. A federal court order to construct 200 units of low-income residences east of the Saw Mill Parkway, i.e., in the white part of town, led to riots and bombings, death…
Perhaps unexpectedly, choosing the greatest kids movies of all time is quite the serious task. First of all, just deciding what constitutes a kid movie is surprisingly difficult. Should we judge by the ratings and only go with films rated G? PG? Include a few that are PG-13? Instead of…
Amid a month of not-so stellar releases (we’re looking your way, Fantastic Four), Phoenix Film Festival offers a great reason to head to the theater. For the first time ever, the must-attend spring movie event debuts its summer showcase. Kicking off the showcase is Noah Baumbach’s latest Greta Gerwig vehicle, Mistress America,…
“This conversation is the best one I ever had,” David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) tells us as The End of the Tour wraps up, and the movie, a pleasantly talky chamber piece, gives us welcome bursts of it. That long chat, with a David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel) abashed by the…
It’s heartbreaking that, in his last dramatic film, Robin Williams plays depressed and repressed, burdened by secrets, a man incapable of connecting. Williams invests himself in the role of a closeted Nashville bank manager married to a woman for whom he feels only sexless affection. Clearly, the actor was moved…
Sometime in the 1980s, Marlon Brando had his face digitized, presumably as a way of leaving just a bit more of himself after his departure from this planet. As we see it in Stevan Riley’s documentary Listen to Me Marlon, that speaking, moving hologram looks like a cross between George…
Jonathan Demme’s rock ‘n’ roll dramedy Ricki and the Flash exists in a wormhole where the last five decades of pop culture are a blur. There’s 66-year-old Meryl Streep, playing a broke singer who ditched her family to dominate the stage with the whiskey growl of Janis Joplin, the jangly…
Jason Segel didn’t tell his book club he’d been cast as novelist David Foster Wallace in James Ponsoldt’s biopic The End of the Tour. “I didn’t want to sound like Fancy Pants McGee,” admits Segel over lunch in Los Angeles. (Especially since the 6-foot-4-inch comedy actor is famous for dropping his…
The Clinton-Lewinsky scandal was a boon to comedy, but the comedians who feasted then look gouty today: A small group of white, male millionaires — one of whom would later confess to having ultiple office affairs, perhaps to distract from sexual-harassment allegations — collectively decided to call Lewinsky, then a 22-year-old…
The bicycle is one of the world’s great inventions: You can use it for transport, exercise, entertainment, and work. And thanks to the silver screen, the bicycle serves yet another purpose – as a character. Bicycles make frequent cameos in Hollywood pictures, saving the day, changing the hero’s life, or propelling…
August is an interesting month for the film industry. Most of the summer blockbusters have come and gone (although Fantastic Four is hoping to make some late noise on August 7), but it’s too early for studios to release anything they want remembered for awards season. It’s also a time…
BoJack Horseman lurched out of the gate last year with a whole lotta animal puns and one uncomplicated thesis: Old sitcoms suck. An aggressively stupid and mawkish show from the late Eighties called Horsin’ Around, about an equine-human hybrid in Cosby sweaters who adopts three adorable orphans, made its star,…
It’s been 32 years since the release of National Lampoon’s Vacation, in which Chevy Chase, as dad Clark Griswold, packed his Griswold clan into what looked like a Country Squire from Hell and sought the family-bonding experienceTM by driving cross-country to a mythical mega-amusement park known as Walley World. If…
