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…
The sudden and tragic death of movie and comedy legend Robin Williams felt like getting broadsided by a cinder block, as waves of updates were posted across the Internet. He seemed to have such an unrelenting well of positive energy whether he was a guest on a talk show or…
It’s the thick of the summer movie season, the best of times and the worst of times for film buffs. What better place to escape the August doldrums than you’re local cineplex? Well, someplace that isn’t filled to the rafter with screaming kids and annoying teens would be nice. And…
In Calvary, Brendan Gleeson plays a Catholic priest who plods through a rustic Irish village that’s more brutal than beautiful. The beach is gray, the waves are choppy and the wind whips his cassock as though every step were a fight against nature. In some ways, it is. Gleeson, an…
Lasse Hallström has become an expert at making mom-jeans movies, nonthreatening pictures in which headstrong women find love just when they think it’s too late (Once Around), take the upper hand with their cheating husbands (Something to Talk About) and turn small, French villages topsy-turvy by opening chocolate shops (Chocolat)…
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…
Incompatible fronts collide in director Steven Quale’s weather-horror patience-tester Into the Storm. The first is the summertime yen for righteous kablooey, the dumber the better, exemplified here by drunk galoots hauling ass into a twister on a four-wheeler ATV, tossing beer cans and whooping about getting a “million YouTube hits.”…
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,…
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…
Even those of us who loved Robin Williams as a performer would have to say that sometimes he was too much — too wired, too pleading, too on. There were times when I’d see him nattering away on a late-night talk show, or suffer through a performance like the one…
Emma Stone and Colin Firth in Magic in the Moonlight.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…
On this week’s , Stephanie defends her Guardians of the Galaxy review against internet trolls who tell her to go suck eggs, and we touch on Scarlett Johansson in Lucy and the excellent James Brown biopic Get on Up. There’s a lot to be had in this one. Enjoy…
Beware the movie that’s Fun! with a capital F, the one populated with seemingly unpretentious characters that say adorable, clever things, the one that presents each off-kilter joke as if it were a porcelain curio, the one that boasts a comfort-food soundtrack of songs you’ve always liked but perhaps haven’t…
“The heart wants what it wants,” Woody Allen has taught us, and apparently what his heart wants these days is not to have to bother with writing second drafts of film scripts. His latest, Magic in the Moonlight, plays like a sumptuous vacation, its stars larking in ’20s finery about…
He couldn’t have known it at the time, but James Brown’s debut recording and first chart hit — made in 1956 with the Famous Flames — is a question that contains its own answer. The lyric to “Please, Please, Please” speaks, pretty obviously, of sexual desire. But Brown’s voice is…
Mood Indigo is bitter candy, a heartbreaker that uses sugar as a trap. The director, Michel Gondry, has a brilliant, contradictory brain. He’s a swoony pessimist, a big-dreaming romantic who believes in love at first sight but never lets his films end with a kiss. Instead, his idea of a…
James Brown stripped pop to its rhythmic essentials: the groove and the grunt, the bridge and the scream. Tate Taylor’s Get On Up likewise reduces James Brown — and the biopic form — to all that matters most. Here are the highs of the man’s life, both artistic and recreational…
Fandom is a weird beast. It can make otherwise sane individuals do things that not even a lifetime of drinking will erase from memory. Some extreme fans of Supernatural seem to fit into that category. For those of you who aren’t in the know, it’s a show on The CW…
On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, Amy Nicholson of the L.A. Weekly and Stephanie Zacharek of The Village Voice interview film critic and author Karina Longworth, who’s just launched a fascinating new podcast on the history of Hollywood called You Must Remember This. Karina talks about the movies and…
Philip Seymour Hoffman is an island of rumpled calm in Anton Corbijn’s urgent A Most Wanted Man, a glum-out-of-principle espionage story based on a John Le Carré novel. The role demands that Hoffman be quiet, steady, occasionally frustrated, and that he hold secrets — often from us, which is a…
Uncomfortable-silence auteur Joe Swanberg has made a career of testing how much falseness you can strip out and still have a movie. What if people on-screen talked like people off it, and if their moments of realization — this is the person I love! — worked out about as well…
