Ruben Östlund makes films the way sociologists devise thought experiments: by posing a hypothesis and thinking fully through its consequences. The Swedish director’s previous feature, 2011’s Play, follows a group of black teenagers in Gothenburg as they blithely coerce a trio of affluent white children to hand over their valuables…
Alexandre Aja’s Horns is the rare YA-ish romance that doesn’t make like a guidance counselor and force the characters to shake hands and forgive. It’s a biblically tinged, eye-for-an-eye vengeance thriller about an emo boyfriend named Ig (Daniel Radcliffe) whose childhood sweetheart Merrin (Juno Temple) has been murdered underneath the…
It’s awards season and the hyped movies are starting to land in theaters. On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, we talk about Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, starring Michael Keaton, and Alex Ross Perry’s Listen Up Philip, and carve out some time to recommend Nothing Bad Can Happen and Glen…
An average of 200 migrant men, women, and children are found dead each year in the stretch of Sonoran Desert known colloquially as “the Corridor of Death.” The Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office is faced with the somewhat daunting task of identifying these souls and reuniting them with their families…
We can’t wait to see what American Horror Story’s Ryan Murphy does with his new project American Crime Story. The first season is set to cover the O.J. Simpson case in 10 episodes next year on FX, and it’s rumored that the show will explore the crime from the point…
With the news that Paul Feig is going to reboot Ghostbusters with an all-female cast, we wonder on this week’s Voice Film Club podcast what it would be like if they re-did another ’80s classic: Young Guns. We then move onto the latest Brad Pitt World War II movie, Fury,…
Before there was a Birdman, there was a Batman — several, in fact, though the best was played by Michael Keaton in the two Tim Burton films in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Since then, Christian Bale’s somber strutting and muttering, as seen in Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies, has…
Should we trust artists to tell the story of artists? On the plus side, who understands them better? If there’s a secret language of imagination and creativity, then the members of this sprawling tribe must be the ones who speak it best. On the other hand, could there be anything…
Among its many attributes, Justin Simien’s exuberant debut feature, Dear White People, proves that we’re not yet living in a “post-racial America”: Forget for a moment that there are so many vexing problems entwining race, class, and economics that we haven’t been able to put a Band-Aid on, let alone…
The tragedy of Jason Reitman’s Men, Women & Children is that it was released the year it was made. A snapshot of today’s cultural disconnection, in which Facebook, texting, World of Warcraft, and streaming smut lure people away from dinner with their families, the film’s so current that its observations…
Jazz isn’t dead. Miraculously, there’s always a small but steady stream of young people who continue to fall in love with this most dazzling and elusive American genre, spending hours, days, and months running ribbons of scales and memorizing Charlie Parker solos in the hopes that some of the alto…
Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice, along with LA Weekly’s Amy Nicholson, open this week’s podcast with a brief discussion of Twin Peaks, which comes back to TV via a series on Showtime in 2016, and move onto The Judge, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Robert Duvall,…
It was a mystery that reporter Gary Webb would have jumped on: a man who’d made powerful enemies allegedly committing suicide with two gunshots to the head. The tragedy is that Webb was the deceased. Michael Cuesta’s earnest, ire-inducing Kill the Messenger is a David-and-Goliath story where truth is the…
A gloom hangs over writer-director David Ayer’s brutal war drama Fury that only the audience can see. It’s April 1945, and we know that in weeks the Nazis will surrender. The war is already over — Hitler just hasn’t admitted it. American sergeant Don “Wardaddy” Collier (Brad Pitt) suspects as…
Knocking out the first-rate forgeries that fooled 60 American museums? That was a curiously mundane miracle, something for Mark Landis to do while watching TV. A frail and ascetic Mississippian who resembles Michael Stipe playing Truman Capote, Landis sketched and painted minor Currans, Averys, and Cassatts with one eye on…
The big news: In its first half, before it bottoms out with the rankest feel-goodery, Theodore Melfi’s too-familiar ain’t-he-irascible comedy-drama St. Vincent features scene after scene of Bill Murray actually trying to make you laugh. How long has it been? He plays Vincent, a drunk-driving Brooklynite whose look suggests science…
Well, ladies and gentleman, the time has almost come for the 14th annual Scottsdale International Film Festival to begin screening extraordinary movies from across the globe. With 40 films in this year’s lineup, it’s no easy task to decide which films you’ll see and which you’ll have to skip between…
Since news broke last month that James Franco had optioned author Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Rant for the big screen, there has been a lot of speculation over whether Franco will act, direct, and/or produce the film. It looks like fans finally have a (likely) answer…
Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice, along with LA Weekly’s Amy Nicholson, talk about one of the big movies of the year, Gone Girl, which opens in about 3,000 U.S. theaters on Friday, but the trio also makes room for lesser-known films like The Blue Room, Men,…
Everything about Gone Girl, David Fincher’s adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s enormously popular 2012 thriller about a deteriorating marriage and a wife gone missing, is precise and thoughtful — it’s as well planned as the perfect murder, with its share of vicious, shivery delights. But at the end of the perfect…
In one Nick Cave song, a pedophiliac outlaw caps a murder spree by killing the devil himself. In another, the narrator muses on Miley Cyrus while seeking the “God particle” down a boulevard lined with burning trees. Cave is fluent in apocalyptic imagery and the Bible; his songs are filled…
Surprisingly moving for a film assembled from such familiar scenes, Craig Johnson’s The Skeleton Twins mushes together queasy/quirky indie family drama with the beats of a romantic comedy. You know the outline just from eyeballing the poster: Kristen Wiig’s Maggie and Bill Hader’s Milo find their way toward loving each…
