Hollywood lives by the simple, sad axiom “Where there’s money, there’s more money,” which is how we get remakes of movies that sometimes shouldn’t have been made in the first place, two Spider-Man reboots within five years and a Star Wars franchise that ensures our children’s children will revere George…
The death of Amy Winehouse, in July 2011, at age 27, was one of the first great tragedies of 21st-century pop music, an event — like the deaths of Tupac Shakur and Kurt Cobain in the last decade of the 20th — that emphasized the jarring contrast between the fragility…
The first time I watched Richard Elfman’s Forbidden Zone, I lasted 13 minutes and 32 seconds. I know this because I made sure to jot it down when I turned it off. The movie isn’t horrible by any means — in fact, it’s a rarity of cinema worth your time…
For more than 30 seasons combined, men and women seeking mates — or seeking something, anyway — have competed for love on The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. You can count on one hand how many relationships spawned on the shows have worked out, but long odds didn’t keep about 200…
The upcoming Amy Winehouse documentary Amy is one of the best music docs Village Voice film critic Stephanie Zacharek has ever seen, and she explains why to Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl and LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson this week. Also this week: The confusing (yet really, really enjoyable)…
After 12 years on the air, The Daily Show With Jon Stewart became required viewing during the Dubya years, when much of the nation was desperate to look to almost anyone else for political leadership. The Comedy Central series offered nightly catharsis in five- or eight-minute bursts, voicing the anger and…
Five films into the franchise, Terminator: Genisys feels like a VHS cassette that’s been rewound and recorded over for 21 years. Director Alan Taylor (of the unmemorable Thor: The Dark World) gives us images — a thumbs-up, an abandoned factory, a liquid-metal cop smashing through the windshield of a car…
Steven Soderbergh’s 2012 Magic Mike was a cocktease. The ads tempted audiences with sweaty chests and thrusting crotches, but after Soderbergh lured us into his all-male strip club, he turned on the lights to show us the squalor. His hunks were drugged and morally decayed. The women — the sober…
Crystal Moselle’s documentary The Wolfpack is a Manhattan fable about fear. Two decades ago, a Hare Krishna, conspiracy theorist and self-described god named Oscar Angulo moved from Peru to a public housing tenement on the Lower East Side with his American bride, Susanne, whom he’d met and wooed on the…
When Ser Steak and Spirits’ executive chef was updating the restaurant’s dessert menu, he thought kicking it old school was the best bet. For whatever reason, the Millionaire Pie disappeared from the menu, but after much popular demand, the chef felt it was time to bring it back. “Why come…
Some movies are indefensible, and Ted 2 is one of them. Not only is this a movie about a libidinous, foul-mouthed stuffed bear; it’s the sequel to an earlier movie about a libidinous, foul-mouthed stuffed bear. But I laughed and laughed at Ted 2 — as I did at the…
A romance about wanting to see a romance, a comic tragedy about an onlooker willing something tragic, Anne Fontaine’s Flaubert-inspired meta-pleasure Gemma Bovery takes as its subject the act of watching the lives around us — and of wishing those lives were literature. Or films: Here’s a French film thick…
Local celebrities are fun. And bartending competitions are super fun because it involves alcohol and tossing of cups and yelling “Get me a double vodka soda” over a loud karaoke rendition of “Uptown Funk You Up.” But the official Celebrity Bartender Throwdown at 6 p.m. Tuesday at Snuffer’s in Addison…
By now, the “cirque” experience is synonymous with high dollar, high rolling entertainment—but by no means does that have to be the case. Sure, the Cirque du Soleil empire gets all the name recognition and has a lock on zillion dollar sets and complex hydraulics, but the unaffiliated Cirque Dreams…
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl may not be the best teen cancer weepie ever made, if there even is a best teen cancer weepie. But it’s surely the most adorable, for better or worse — less like The Fault in Our Stars and more like Diary of a…
Part of what makes writer-director Rick Famuyiwa’s Dope so fresh and joyous is that in many key ways it’s not new at all. Here’s a dramatic teen comedy, flavor-crystaled with sex and drugs and innocent raunch, about good friends who get caught up in bad business on their way to…
The first time we cry, as a newborn, might be the purest emotion we ever feel. We sob — a raw mess of tears and terror — and a big human rushes to give comfort. Mentally, the connection is made: My feelings trigger a response, be it hugs or milk…
A few days ago, we got to see Jurassic World. It’s not awful and it’s not great, either — it’s just appetizing enough to enjoy. However, there are a lot of plot holes, continuity, character decisions, and moments in the movie that just don’t make any sense. Here are some…
Gregg Turkington is one of the greatest comedians of our time and you probably haven’t heard of him. If us girls are being honest here, it’s likely he’ll stay pretty far off your radar. He’s best known for is character Neil Hamburger, a strange alter ego of Turkington that the…
New York has often been the setting for films about heroin addicts, with titles ranging from Shirley Clarke’s cinéma-vérité-tweaking The Connection (1961) to Slava Tsukerman’s new-wave cult classic Liquid Sky (1982) mining the drama of smack freaks tying off, shooting up and nodding out. But Josh and Benny Safdie’s tough,…
In Jurassic World, Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic Park reboot — set 22 years after dinosaurs started walking the Earth, again — brontosauruses, stegosauruses and velociraptors have become old hat, sort of like the mechanical Abe Lincoln at Disneyland. Meanwhile, the habitat around them has gone Vegas: Isla Nublar, home of the…
Rub the sleep out of your eyes, Dallas. Fuel up with a double shot of espresso, a few rips off your roommate’s bong, or whatever it will take you key you up for an especially long weekend of cinematic jouissance. Oak Cliff Film Festival is back for its fourth year…
