Originally slated to open in September 2012, Gangster Squad was delayed when the movie-theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, suddenly made a scene of gunfire in Grauman’s Chinese Theatre “inappropriate.” But released any time, the movie would be a crime against cinematic sensibility. As Gangster Squad opens, boss Mickey Cohen (Sean…
When he died in December 2011, Kim Jong Il left behind more than a dynastic regime and a closet full of drab pantsuits. Jong Il, who ruled the hermetic North Korea from his father Kim Il Sung’s death in 1994 until his own passing 17 years later, was a noted…
There was a corridor of time when Cuba’s potential felt unlimited. Revolution brought power, and — at least for a while — it seemed like everyone would get a slice. Castro had some big ideas about how to make that happen, but one of his grandest involved a golf course,…
Because a news reporting bird, hamsters in a blimp, a kitten halftime show and 63 puppies hadn’t been adorable enough to initiate world peace, Animal Planet announced a new addition to its roster yesterday: a “squadron of cheerleading hedgehogs.” They’ll take the field for the main event from 3 to…
Should we blame a script oversight or shoddy editing for our collective emotional blue balls? It’s a question Downton Abbey fans are asking themselves after being left at the alter midway through the season three premiere. After two years of following Mary and Cousin Matthew’s dramatic push and pull, we…
Editor’s note: The author is British, so this thing is, like, authentic. Downton Abbey returns Sunday, so to celebrate, buy the finest wine you can afford to drink in large quantities, send the staff away for the weekend, become horrified by the smallest social faux pas, and sip gently and…
Queen’s operatic rock anthem. Intergalactic football fighting. A plot as gapped and breezy as an open knit. Flash Gordon (1980) is a cosmic cog in the machinery of big budget releases — and that is precisely why we adore it. Texas Theatre appreciates the B-ist of all B-cinema, so it’s…
“Just so you know, it’s going to take a while,” says the CIA officer to his newly arrived colleague at the start of Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty. The year is 2003, the place a secret prison (or “black site”) somewhere in the deserts of the Middle East or Asia,…
Salesmen are typically depicted in screen drama as the quintessential American phonies. The exceptions — in Barry Levinson’s Avalon or Whit Stillman’s Barcelona — are buried under a mountain of films proving the rule. When we first meet Promised Land’s phony, played by Matt Damon, he’s preparing to sell himself,…
While surveying 2012, there are probably a few areas that you’d like to tweak: finances, romance, your workout plan. Sometimes converting those goals into actions requires an extra push, and you can’t beat a visual reminder when putting yourself in gear. Here’s a few movies that align with your resolutions…
P erhaps in response to bombastic mainstream Hollywood, international auteurs often veer toward minimalism—quieter emotions, slower tempos, a tightly defined era and setting. Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes is clearly a man of the art house—his new film, Tabu, which opens this week, was shot on 16mm black-and-white film stock, for…
Most of the blathering this year about the death of film and film culture has already evaporated from the mind, like so much inert gas. But one gnomic pronouncement endures: Leos Carax describing cinema as “a beautiful island with a cemetery” following the world premiere of Holy Motors at Cannes…
More than ever, boiling this concluding year down to the 10 “best” movies feels both arbitrary and reductive. Ideally, I’d have 25 unnumbered slots. I’d cite another five, formally varied nonfiction films: Tchoupitoulas, Detropia, The Ambassador, Only the Young, and How to Survive a Plague. And were I crafting this…
Watching Django Unchained, it’s easy to imagine that Quentin Tarantino had such a blast making his last picture, the ebullient Holocaust fantasia Inglourious Basterds, that he decided to take his whole blood-spattered historical tent show on the road, this time putting down stakes in antebellum Dixieland. Although not technically a…
You can hear the people sing — really hear them — in the long-gestating screen version of that Broadway juggernaut Les Misérables. Countering the standard practice of having the actors in a film musical lip-synch their songs to prerecorded tracks, director Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech) insisted that all of…
Sadly, country songwriters stand as nearly the only entertainers in our popular culture who craft memorable art on the subject of marriage, the state in which just less than half of Americans spend the majority of their lives. A few years back, Brad Paisley, one of Nashville’s best, wrote and…
In his 2005 novel One Shot, writer Lee Child lays out nine rules for surviving a five-against-one alley fight, a challenge his hero, the ex-Army cop Jack Reacher, is about to face. These include “Be on your feet and ready.” “Identify the ringleader.” “Don’t break the furniture.” Rule number nine…
Once comic actors reach a particular career stage, they often choose one of two paths: A) They stop being funny and start being all Hallmark heartwarming, i.e., by growing a beard and playing a psychiatrist. B) They accept unambitious, work-for-hire roles in mass-market family comedies about some combination of dogs,…
Set in East Germany in 1980, Christian Petzold’s superb Barbara is a transfixing Cold War thriller made even more vivid by its subtle overlay of the golden-era “woman’s picture,” the woman in question being Dr. Barbara Wolff, brilliantly played by Nina Hoss in her fifth film with the writer-director. Yet…
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, one must have a heart of stone to watch Jacques Audiard’s outrageous melodrama Rust and Bone without laughing. Loosely adapted from two works in Craig Davidson’s 2005 short story collection of the same name, Rust and Bone finds Audiard returning to the overdetermined characters and swift…
There’s traffic from Silver Lake. That’s why Kristen Stewart and Garrett Hedlund, the stars of On the Road, are late to the Benedict Room of the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. We’re as psychically far from Jack Kerouac’s Beat gospel as you can get: fidgeting under crystal chandeliers in…
Quentin Tarantino has been Googling himself, and it’s starting to become a problem. The filmmaker, whose eighth feature, Django Unchained, opens on Christmas Day, is famously an analog evangelist: He writes his scripts in longhand; he bans cell phones from his sets and hasn’t had one of his own in…
