Forrest Gump has turned 20 and is celebrating its birthday with a week-long IMAX release. It’s a significant milestone for the six-time Academy Award winner. Today, 1994 is as far away from the present as the Vietnam War was from it. Forrest Gump was a fable without a moral, the…
The Identical is Elvis slash fiction that could have been written by a spinster church organist. Its premise is intriguing: What if Jesse Presley, Elvis’ twin brother who was stillborn at birth, was in fact secretly given to a traveler minister (Ray Liotta) and his infertile wife (Ashley Judd)? What…
Every other year or so, someone comes down the indie-movie pike with an idea for an unconventional zombie movie — as opposed to the workaday ones, where the dead simply return to life and chew on limbs and stuff. Life After Beth, the debut film from writer-director Jeff Baena, strives…
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…
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…
After The Princess Bride made Robin Wright a star, she shocked Hollywood by saying no. No to The Firm and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. No to Jurassic Park, Dirty Dancing, Born on the Fourth of July and Batman Forever. She even said no to the cover of Vanity Fair…
Here’s what an R rating gets you these days: a few splattery headshots, some glimpses of cable TV-style background nudity, a couple kids and families popped by assassins, a brace of fucks, in dialogue, and one un-bracing fuck, in bed, mostly clothed. During its longueurs, this engagingly grim spy-versus-spymasters time-passer…
Dallas/Fort Worth is getting a third Alamo Drafthouse movie theater to fulfill the needs of the Metroplex’s more hardcore and addicted cinephiles. The theater chain announced earlier today that it plans to open a third location in Las Colinas in the new Music Factory shopping and entertainment complex located at…
During a recent evening rush-hour, KERA was serving commuters one of its usual panels of NPR experts talking about the news, in this case the death of Michael Brown, the unarmed black teenager shot dead by a white Ferguson, Missouri, police officer. The talking heads all agreed: America needs to…
Why did so few people see Sin City: A Dame to Kill For over the weekend? That and other topics are discussed in this week’s edition of the Voice Film Club podcast with the Village Voice’s Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek, joined as always by Amy Nicholson of the L.A…
Photo by Phil Bray – © 2014 – LionsgateWell, who was it? Find out in this week’s pod.On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of The Village Voice and Amy Nicholson of L.A. Weekly sift through the smoldering pile of action movie that is the…
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…
If the clothes of Yves Saint Laurent were groundbreaking, the designer’s mystique was as subtle as the curve of an invisibly molded sleeve. Those who have picked up just a little Saint Laurent lore may know about his beginnings at the House of Dior in the late 1950s and his…
Should grown-ups be spending their time reading young-adult novels, at the risk of missing the supposed riches of fiction written for actual grown-ups? A recent essay in Slate groused about the legions of adults who long ago graduated from the 12th grade but still devour YA fiction at the expense…
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…
How did it get this way? That’s one question left un-addressed in too much of the coverage of the clashes between police and protesters in Ferguson, Missouri. How, in a generation, did a majority white suburb of St. Louis become majority black, mostly broke, and bereft of opportunity? And how…
It wasn’t that long ago that having a beer in a movie theater was a novelty if you didn’t count sneaking your own into the theater. These days, dine-in theaters are popping up almost as frequently as the giant megaplex cinemas that serve real alcohol. This is a wonderful innovation…
When we last saw Joe MacMillan, the mercurial Dallas salesmen at the center of the AMC computer drama Halt and Catch Fire, he was wandering into the Texas wilderness, seemingly without purpose, or direction, or even snacks. Considering the show’s meager ratings and uneven critical reception, it wasn’t hard to…
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. They also recommend We Are Mari Pepa, a slight movie about growing up…
Land Ho! is a How Grandpa Got His Groove Back for the geezer set, a buddy road trip through Iceland, starring two divorced men with a combined age of 150 years. The writer-directors, Martha Stephens and Aaron Katz, are 30 and 34, respectively, young enough to be their leading men’s…
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…
