Pitch Perfect 2 hit a few wrong notes for the Village Voice’s Alan Scherstuhl and special guest Monica Castillo, but LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson interpreted the film’s humor a little differently. We circle back to Sofia Vergara’s performance in Hot Pursuit, before arriving in the desert for Mad…
Blues legend Bessie Smith was arguably America’s most powerful black woman during her heyday in the ’20s and ’30s. Her reign wasn’t just based on being the highest-paid African-American entertainer of her generation, but, according to the new HBO movie Bessie, on the freedoms she allowed herself after breaking with…
“I’m over people who think they’re funnier than the movie,” says LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson, in the wake of her recent piece, “Stop Laughing at Old Movies, You $@%&ing Hipsters.” Joining her — *in the same room, for the first time ever on the podcast* — as usual…
Sofía Vergara is built like an amphora, a living testament to the form ceramicists throughout the centuries have adored. In the fleet and gloriously ridiculous comedy Hot Pursuit, Vergara plays Daniella Riva, a mobster’s wife who needs to be escorted from San Antonio to Dallas, where she’ll testify against the…
Depending on whom you talk to, we live in an era of conformity or one of anything-goes individuality; in a golden age of television or the brightest of movie galaxies. But just about everyone will agree that we’re ruled by screens of all sizes, which means it’s harder than ever…
Diane Keaton thinks her new film is delightfully ironic. Richard Loncraine’s 5 Flights Up is the latest in that burgeoning genre, Retiree Real Estate Romantic Comedy, where cool, gray-haired New Yorkers realize they can barely afford to live in the city where they fell in love. Keaton plays a teacher…
One of the most inspired ideas in late-middle Woody Allen pictures comes in Deconstructing Harry, a movie about how Allen loves Bergman, hates Philip Roth, and isn’t quite clear on what “deconstruction” means. Allen stages passages from fiction written by the protagonist, a novelist named Harry. One features Robin Williams…
Avengers: Age of Ultron director and screenwriter Joss Whedon wants to give us everything in his movie, and that he fits it all in is its own kind of feat, writes LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson in her review of the film, which opens May 1…
Author J.K. Rowling’s rags-to-riches biography is arguably better known than her most famous creation, Harry Potter. As the oft-repeated origin story goes, Rowling was a single mother making ends meet, aided by government assistance while she was scribbling the first installment of her phenomenally successful fantasy series in a café…
Though it’s hard to believe in 2015, there was a time when fictional heroines didn’t have to be role models, when a character’s backbone could be more than just a row of vertebrae lined up into teachable moments. It’s wonderful that modern readers love Jane Austen — we still warm…
One of Kristen Wiig’s finest moments as a movie star is a throwaway bit of shamed silent morning-after comedy: Her Bridesmaids character is skulking out of the home of a cad played by Jon Hamm. She’s playing it cool, swallowing back the humiliation of her bad choices, trying to show…
On Voice Film Club podcast, we marvel at teen horror film Unfriended, and while it is “85 minutes of watching someone else use a computer,” the filmmaker’s adept at turning a screen into a natural storytelling platform: “Director Levan Gabriadze summons up exquisite unease just by the way a cursor…
“I hope they’re not scared off and think it’s like The Cove,” Jonathan Franzen said on Monday evening. He was referring to potential audiences for Emptying the Skies, Roger and Douglas Kass’s new documentary based on his 2010 New Yorker essay about songbird poaching in the Mediterranean. “I never saw…
A post-Wikipedia biographical documentary, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck finds Brett Morgen constructing a feature-length collage of notebook entries, demo tapes, rehearsal footage, home movies, archival photos, and drawings and artwork by the late Nirvana frontman. It’s an impressive, comprehensive assemblage, designed to impart not a point-by-point historical account but,…
Avengers: Age of Ultron is a complicated, ticking machine — a cuckoo clock under attack. Returning helmer Joss Whedon is earnestly trying to make a movie out of a bag of bolts: six stars, nine cameos, three enemies, and at least 10 films to go before the climactic Avengers: Infinity…
I dread explaining man-child dramedies to the ghosts of the dead. “You see, Grandpa, after your time, a generation paralyzed by the economy and indecision stopped growing up — and started churning out indie movies justifying why not.” In the ’40s, men fought wars at 18. In 1967, Benjamin Braddock…
No show wears its love for language and land more proudly than FX’s Justified, which ended its six-year run on April 14. Based on a novella by Elmore Leonard and starring squinty-eyed sex symbol Timothy Olyphant, the hillbilly noir never received the critical adulation or the audience one might expect…
The trolling is coming from inside the house! Mere emojis can’t capture the plugged-in joys of the first hour or so of haunted-Internet teen flick Unfriended, which knives with dexterous wit The Way We Live Now. Here’s a clutch of horny high school dopes hanging out on Skype, getting doxed…
Ex Machina is an egghead thriller with a scary selling point: Unlike Liam Neeson shooting up half of Boston, this actually could be taking place right now. It’s a smart film about the shrinking divide between man and robot. It’s also a hoot, an anti-comedy where all of the jokes…
It’s nearly impossible to convince the average American citizen, especially if he’s a straight man, that haute couture has a reason to exist. The phrase isn’t just a catch-all for “really expensive clothes,” as it’s commonly misunderstood, but a specific term for clothes made entirely by hand, for a specific…
Is it possible to be accidentally definitive? James D. Cooper’s thorough and revealing doc Lambert & Stamp is billed as the story of the managers who whipped the Who into being the Who. But once it’s sketched out, the characters and ambitions of Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert, putative New…
Did you know that there’s a new family-audience feature film that implies God nuked Japan because one plucky American moppet dared to dream? That’s no exaggeration. In the summer of 1945, the kid stands on a California dock, points his fingers magician-style out at the Pacific horizon, and screams a…
