Everything in the opening scenes of Jeremy Saulnier’s nerve-wracking revenge drama Blue Ruin is the color of a bruise, from the ocean to the bullet-hole-pocked 1996 Pontiac Bonneville that homeless near-mute Dwight (Macon Blair) calls home. It’s fitting. Dwight has never overcome the pain of his parents’ murder when he…
Although it’s based on the true story of the illegitimate daughter of a Royal Navy captain and an enslaved African woman, Amma Asante’s Belle’s richest inspiration comes from a painting. A 1779 double portrait hanging at Scone Palace in Scotland, it shows a pretty blonde teenager decked out in typical…
Tom Hiddleston can pull off extreme looks. In The Avengers, he strutted around in Loki’s 2-foot horned helmet. For Midnight in Paris, he finessed F. Scott Fitzgerald’s prim finger waves. And in his latest, Jim Jarmusch’s vampire romance Only Lovers Left Alive, Hiddleston lounges bare-chested in velvet-cuffed robes. The only…
Harrison Ford has been a good soldier in the Star Wars. He did whatever was asked of him by his commanding officer, George Lucas, even when his commanding officer was wrong. Now that Ford is back in Star Wars, and J.J. Abrams is running the show, Abrams’ first order of…
On this week’s Voice Film club podcast, L.A. Weekly chief film critic Amy Nicholson, Village Voice film critic Stephanie Zacharek and Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl discuss two movies opening this weekend, including the James Franco’d Palo Alto, which we fully recommend, and the latest version of the West Memphis…
By Danny King By the time Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s 2008 The Dark Knight was finally seen by critics and audiences, talk of a posthumous Oscar reached a fever pitch. Naturally, the inclination to compare Ledger’s work to past posthumous landmarks proved tempting, and many…
It’s been a couple of years since the city of Dallas has had their tolerance tested for excessive violence and suffering presented as entertainment. We don’t mean within the hustle and bustle that is life in the Metroplex. Thanks to a population that’s heavily armed, traditional cuisine that’s deliciously fattening…
How much can you take away and still have a movie? Steven Knight’s Locke is an experiment in reducing contemporary screen storytelling to its irreducible essentials, which isn’t quite the same thing as being an “experimental” film, despite the early reviews from England. It shows us just one actor, on…
Today it’s hard for us to fathom why preachers used to rail so vehemently against jitterbugging. Even with cultural context — black music infiltrating white America; the revolution of rhythm over melody — the athletic whirligig swing-time boogie craze of the ’30s and ’40s now looks as wholesome as ice-cream…
If you’re in a horror movie and you’re the baby-sitter, don’t answer the phone. Don’t hide in the closet. If you find an ouija board, don’t play with it. Never say, “I’ll be right back.” If you’re a woman, don’t take a shower. In fact, keep your clothes on at…
The vampires who walk among us — and they do — are not the Twilight kind, or the True Blood kind, or even the Buffy kind. In the world of Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, the director’s most emotionally direct film since Dead Man, and maybe his finest, period,…
Since 2002, the year Sam Raimi’s SpiderMan hit theaters, the other SpiderMan, the hero of the actual comic books, has joined the Avengers, revealed his secret identity to the world, and become a highly paid inventor who has engineered, among other marvels, a limitless energy source science has dubbed “Parker…
The sexual politics of Nick Cassavetes’s decidedly un-romantic comedy The Other Woman are intriguingly European and, at their core, kind of groovy. Wronged Connecticut wifey-wife Kate (Leslie Mann) seeks out her husband’s mistress, sexy city-slicker and high-powered lawyer Carly (Cameron Diaz), looking to her for answers: Why is my husband…
Texas has spawned dozens of low-budget horror and sci-fi films since the 1960s. Unfortunately most of them suck, although not in the ways most normal, well adjusted filmgoers would think. B-movie fans are some of the most forgiving audiences in the world and will gladly let glaring deficiencies in budget…
You know what sounds nice? Lounging on a picnic blanket, with a couple of sandwiches from Jimmy’s Food Store and a glass of wine, while watching good guy Humphrey Bogart suck face with Lauren Bacall. Apparently that’s not just me, either, because the good people at Klyde Warren Park just…
Just a few weeks after the Dallas International Film Festival packed up its reels and stuffed them into storage, the USA Film Festival has arrived, beginning today at the Angelika Film Center. Although, you may not remember it was happening there are plenty of movie screenings, talk-backs and events for…
Has it ever occurred to contemporary commercial filmmakers that maybe audiences could take a movie’s word for it that a character has been tortured? That perhaps implication and skilled acting could communicate the idea with sufficient power, and that we might all be spared the screaming and limb-breaking and slow-motion…
Going bald is the best thing that ever happened to Jude Law. Britain’s prettiest export did the best he could with his burden of good looks. He played a genetic ideal in Gattaca, a robotic ideal in A.I. Artificial Intelligence and in The Talented Mr. Ripley, his golden god perfection…
The promise of seeing Scarlett Johansson fully nude is probably enough to lure lots of people into Jonathan Glazer’s alien-among-us fantasy Under the Skin, and the vision doesn’t disappoint: Her figure, seen in long shot, is a grand and glowing thing. But her nakedness is the opposite of a sleazy…
Sometimes it’s helpful to know certain details about how a film has come together. And sometimes it’s just so much information. Transcendence, the directorial debut of Christopher Nolan’s go-to cinematographer, Wally Pfister, was shot on film rather than digitally, as most big Hollywood movies (and nearly all small ones) are…
When Wally Pfister won an Oscar for Inception, his sixth film with Christopher Nolan, he went home and put the statuette on his mantel. “And then it moved to the corner, and then my office, and then the closet because you go away for a few months, and then it…
The critics heaping raves on Fargo, the new 10-part series on cable’s FX channel, keep describing its lead actress Allison Tolman as “an unknown.” But Dallas theatergoers know her well. She’s that funny, bold performer who starred in plays and musicals at Second Thought Theatre (a company she co-founded with…
