Hollywood has produced many great cinematic works. Tommy Wiseau’s The Room is not one of them. “It’s a perfect train wreck,” says Greg Sestero, one of the film’s stars. But the emphasis here is perfect. The film’s so-bad-it’s-good charm has given rise to a cult following over the years, setting…
Even fans of Fifty Shades of Grey admit the book is a literary atrocity. Novelist E.L. James’ erotic reveries read like the rantings of a drunk yokel — less “His firm hands cupped my breasts” and more “Holy crap! He’s touching my boobs!” The story is simple: 21-year-old virgin Anastasia…
Ten years ago, Wellington, New Zealand, was less welcoming of vampires. When Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, two unknown comedians, walked the streets in velvet frocks and ruffles for a 2005 sketch, dudes would drive by and scream homophobic slurs. Says Clement, “We were constantly abused.” Over the next decade,…
In the olden days, what month it was never mattered to movies. But today the late winter months are well-known as a weedy boneyard of mouth-breathing Hollywood castoffs, and we explore it at the cost of our patience, time, shekels, and optimism. For the love of everything holy, stay home…
Here at last is peak Anna Kendrick: In intimate long takes and in comic montage, she belts, hurts, swoons, and rages, always remaining appealingly human. You can tell, when Kendrick scraps for her big notes, that she’s not a natural, that she’s working hard, that she’s living a dream. All…
American Sniper notwithstanding, the first fresh multiplex trend to emerge in 2015 is Old White Dudes Learning How to Share Their World. First came Kevin Costner in the sour Black or White, playing a coot who discovers that black folks love their kids, too, even in South Los Angeles. Who…
Shove off, John Hughes. The DUFF, a high school comedy by Ari Sandel, opens by declaring that The Breakfast Club’s social categories are, like, way passé. Explains lead Bianca (Mae Whitman), “Jocks play video games, princesses are on antidepressants, and geeks rule the world.” Today, be ye goth kid, science…
Fifty Shades of Grey is opening is nationwide, and in New York, Village Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl connects via the magic of the Internet with LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson discuss the hotly anticipated movie starring Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson, adapted from the E. L. James novel…
To the idle viewer, the small acts of resistance on display in Timbuktu might seem ready-made for Upworthy, little liberal lessons just waiting to be parceled out to anyone who “won’t believe what happens next.” Yet that type of self-righteous sentimentality — and its opposing strawman, knee-jerk cynicism — is…
The steps leading to the altar of Terrence Malick are practically a safety hazard, cluttered as they are with assorted offerings of frankincense and myrrh, bouquets draped with sashes that shout “Good job!” and perhaps a virgin sacrifice or two. Critics and certain moviegoers love him that much, which explains…
In 2004, I worked at a bar in Kansas City’s River Market district. One night, a woman handed me her credit card to pay her tab; I looked at it and said, “HAHA. Your name is Monica Ross!” She made a big, exasperated noise and dropped her forehead to the…
February already? Just as the awards season rush dies down from December and January, we hit what is widely considered to be a dead month for movie releases. There may be a few surprises (last year’s Lego Movie turned out to be one of the biggest February hits of all…
(Heavy spoilers for the pilot; very light spoilers for the second and third episodes.) There’s more than one way to start a revolution. You can get high off your own sense of righteousness and authenticity, as celebrity chef and Fresh Off the Boat memoirist Eddie Huang recently did by calling…
“You ready for another miserable video game?” I heard one critic crack to another as I settled in for Jupiter Ascending. “Maybe in March we’ll see this year’s first good movie,” his pal said back, as if Girlhood, Hard to Be a God, Amira & Sam, Timbuktu, Joy of Man’s…
BERLIN — Riding from the Berlin-Tegel airport to my hotel on a crisp, sunny day last week, my cab passed the magnificent golden angel statue known as the Victory Column, a monument erected by the city in 1874 to commemorate assorted Prussian military victories of the day. But people all…
Those more devoted to the genre can debate whether Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsman is the best comic-book movie of the last few years. What’s beyond argument, however, is that Vaughn has whipped up the most interesting one, the only to make ferocious, unsettling art out of the great contradiction of superheroic…
‘Tis the season. Shockingly, we’re not talking about football anymore. Instead, we’re talking about film. Sundance recently took over Park City, the Oscars are at the end of the month, and Phoenix was just entertained by our own LGBT film festival, Desperado. But now, it’s time for the Valley to…
Jimmy Fallon brought a spectacular post-Super Bowl XLIX Tonight Show to Phoenix’s Orpheum Theatre on Sunday, February 1. Valley dwellers who scored notoriously tough-to-get tickets (they were gone in literally four minutes!) to the on-the-road edition of the late-night show were treated to a mega-entertaining and star-studded evening full of…
In the opening moments of Two Days, One Night, a working-class Belgian woman named Sandra (Marion Cotillard) wakes from a midday nap, takes a phone call, removes a tart from the oven, pops a pill, and begs herself not to cry. With a sense of having arrived in the middle…
Halfway through Laura Gabbert’s documentary City of Gold, a salute to Jonathan Gold, the Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic’s brother Mark reveals a dark family secret: Gold grew up devouring iceberg lettuce and orange Jell-O. Every day, we eat. It’s a must. And those meals tell a story: The peanut sauce…
Jude Law, once so shiny-penny-clean and pretty — and with the kind of chin dimple that might have inspired Audrey Hepburn to ask, as she did of Cary Grant in Charade, “How do you shave in there?” — is only now reaching the age where we can call his face…
No matter how you end up feeling about it, there sure is a lot of movie in Mommy, Xavier Dolan’s exuberant melodrama about an emotional firecracker of a teenager who, after being kicked out of a specialized school for setting the cafeteria on fire, goes home to live with his…
