According to inspirational sports movies, winning demands you train hard, play with heart, be a team, and not care about winning. So it goes in the sturdy, crowd-pleasing When the Game Stands Tall, a profile in saintliness puffed up from a true story: the Northern California Catholic school whose football…
Sin City, population unknown but dropping every minute, is a gorgeous place, but you wouldn’t want to live there. Even the shadows and broken glass are beautiful in this black-and-white world. Only the women — all gorgeous — give the streets a pop of color. That is, only the women…
Genius is hell, both for the blessed and those stuck in the shadows, cursed to spend a lifetime smashing their heads against the glass. In its presence we find ourselves dwarfed and dumb, like moths. We know we’re before brilliance we can’t comprehend — and we know we’ll never have…
You could be forgiven, after watching the opening minutes of Ira Sachs’ fine-grained and flinty Love Is Strange, for thinking it’s going to be a movie about Gay Marriage, with all the import those initial caps imply. We see two older men, clearly a couple, roll out of bed in…
For women especially, it’s wholly out of fashion to have sympathy for middle-aged white men. In both real life and fiction, the thinking goes: They’ve reigned supreme long enough. Who cares about their anxiety over their receding hairlines, their poochy stomachs, their inability to attract young babes? That tinny plink…
For two nights, people crowded the Welcome Diner front patio to watch 11 short films made in just 48 hours. Each team was randomly assigned an odd genre to make a film, with such options as “talking animal sitcom” and “coming-of-age time travel.” What the teams made in just two…
If there’s a problem with Michael Rossato-Bennett’s Alive Inside: A Story of Music and Memory, an engaging, vaguely uplifting documentary about how personalized music therapy can help dementia patients, it’s that it ignores the very tune it’s playing. Rather than present its elderly, memory-impaired subjects as human beings who deserve…
Williams in Moscow on the HudsonOn this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of The Village Voice and Amy Nicholson of L.A. Weekly remember Robin Williams, who died on Monday. He was 63…
When you put a pair of losers in uniforms, at the end of the day they’re still losers. Best friends and roommates Justin (Damon Wayans Jr.) and Ryan (Jake Johnson) learn that the hard way but not without finding some joy in the fantasy that you can become the success…
Titles don’t get more ironic than The Expendables 3. The franchise claims to be about death-seeking mercenaries yet stars ’80s action heroes, who refuse to die. Three films in, everyone in the sprawling team is still alive and ass kicking, save for Bruce Willis, whose million-dollar-a-day asking salary has caused…
The Giver is more simple and raw than the rest of today’s teen dystopias that try to cram in unnecessary backstory and love triangles. (Original author Lois Lowry published her novel in 1993, which makes it officially the cool aunt of Katniss and the kids.) The story picks up several…
Maybe you think you know what Woody Allen did or didn’t do in that summerhouse all those years ago. Maybe you look at his history — shacking up with a Stuyvesant high school girl in the late ’70s; marrying his longtime partner’s adopted daughter in the ’90s — and simply…
Actress Lauren Bacall has died. She had a massive stroke on Tuesday, August 12, in New York City, according to TMZ. She was 89. The Golden Age of Hollywood film star was known for her husky voice and “The Look,” Bacall’s way of posing for stills in which she’d put…
This week we mourn the loss of one of the most notable performers of a generation. Actor and comedian Robin Williams was found dead in his Tiburon, California, home from an apparent suicide on Monday, August 11. He was 63 years old. His unexpected passing comes as both a shock…
Robin Williams has died of an apparent suicide, according to multiple news outlets including Entertainment Weekly and TMZ…
The Valley has not yet finished celebrating the life of the late Bill Thompson. The creator, producer and co-host of the hit children’s television program, The Wallace and Ladmo Show, passed away on Wednesday, July 23, at the age of 82. Now the community is coming together to remember Thompson’s…
On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice and Amy Nicholson of L.A. Weekly discuss Woody Allen’s latest, Magic in the Moonlight, and revisit Get on Up and Guardians of the Galaxy, and finally, touch on the new documentary The Dog…
Barricade the windows and cue the Jaws soundtrack, because one of the greatest cinematic train wrecks of all time is returning to select Valley theaters for one night only. And this time, it’s a sequel. For those who missed the July 31 television debut of Sharknado 2: The Second One…
Star presence, that distillation of charisma and sometimes glamour, lies at the heart of the movies’ appeal. The star presence James Harvey evokes so richly in his new book, Watching Them Be, is never simply about physical beauty. Harvey rightly points out that Ingrid Bergman’s fresh unaffectedness was distinctly unglamorous,…
Daniel Radcliffe’s first trip to Comic-Con kicked off like the world’s cuddliest Nuremberg rally. This summer, just minutes after he walked into Hall H, the hangar-sized sardine can of 6,500 people sang him “Happy Birthday.” It was an emotional moment for everyone. “The fact that I was turning 25 slightly…
Before you buy that tiny box turtle in Chinatown, know that it can live for 100 years. Which means that among all the Mad Libs nonsense of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles — a comic book-turned-media-phenomenon that’s always half-admitted it’s a goof — at least the teenage part is accurate…
In the highly imperfect world of contemporary romantic comedies, What If is as close to perfect as anything we’ve got, not least for the way it captures the abject hopefulness of young people who’d like to be in love but don’t know how to go about it. Who does know…
