What’s the best way to celebrate the 25th anniversary of one of Japan’s greatest animated films? Seeing it on the big screen, of course. Duh. If you said something else like developing psychic powers to start a war in a dystopian metropolis, you’re setting the bar too high. The Alamo…
AirwolfberlinJonathan Brandis hanged himself 10 years ago this week at Sixth and Detroit in Los Angeles, in the second-floor hallway of an apartment building south of Hollywood near a decent doughnut shop and a cat groomer. He was 27 years old. And he was my first big crush. If you’re…
From the mid-1990s to somewhere around 2006, Hollywood bankrolled a number of romantic entertainments targeted to — though not made exclusively for — black audiences. Pictures like Love Jones, Brown Sugar, How Stella Got Her Groove Back and Something New provided a showcase for actors of color, a refreshing change…
How is it that no one had yet made the Lucien Carr-David Kammerer murder story into a movie? It’s an irresistible tall tale from the Beat back catalog — how, once upon a time in the mid-’40s, the finger-snapping legends-to-be (Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs) all coalesced around the radiant rebel Carr…
One of the small and big screens’ biggest performers will be at the Alamo Drafthouse tonight to watch one of his most famous performances. Actor Richard Kiel, the 7-foot-2 actor who played the towering Jaws in a pair of James Bond films, will be live and in person at the…
We’ve reached cinematic saturation. With the digital universe prepped for instant download, you can see anything you like, anytime you want. Anyone who’s ever grocery shopped while hungry knows where that gets you. The problem with unlimited access isn’t the gluttony spurred, it’s the inevitable complacency. When faced with too…
Longview’s most famous leading man may have made a name for himself as Southern gentleman eye candy for the chick flick crowd, but he’s not just a piece of meat, damn it. Thanks to a Texas drawl that’s so thick that you could pour it on a stack of flapjacks,…
Birth of the Living Dead.The zombification of America got its start in 1968, when George A. Romero and a bunch of his friends and colleagues released Night of the Living Dead, the scrappy little horror movie that could not only serve as patient zero in the ongoing pop-cultural zombie apocalypse,…
Among the Avengers, Thor should reign supreme. Sure, Captain America is the de facto leader, but even he — like the others — is just a jacked-up human. Thor is a god. Or if not quite a god, as he demurs, he’s the next best thing: a flying Titan with…
Richard Curtis has so much to tell us about life. Seize the day! Show people you love them before it’s too late! Don’t let the right one get away! His movies — those he writes, directs or both — are so packed with info-feeling that they become restless jumbles of…
Besides its cast, a parade of Brit aces the likes of which we haven’t seen since the last episode of Wizard Boy Has a Sad, the quality that most distinguishes Mike Newell’s adaptation of the best-titled of all English novels is its healthy fullness. In the decades since David Lean’s…
While guest-hosting a TV variety show in 1964, Dean Martin ridiculed a hot new rock ’n’ roll act with his trademark blend of cocksure innuendo, aw-shucks buffoonery, and inebriated syntax: “Now, something for the youngsters — five singing boys from England. . . . They’re called the Rollin’ Stones. I…
Weight-loss and weight-gain performances are tricky things. Robert De Niro’s heavily mannered turn in Raging Bull just has to be great — he gained 60 pounds for it, didn’t he? For his role in The Machinist, Christian Bale dropped to a sub-skeletal 122 pounds; he looked like a walking, talking…
Photo by Jay Maidment – © 2012 MVLFFLLC. TM &2012 Marvel. All Rights Reserved. Thor: The Dark World just doesn’t compare to the 2011 original, in spite of its few redeeming qualities. That’s the consensus among this paper’s film critics on this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, available now. Listen…
Before Wes Anderson became the director of quirky, mannered films like Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums and last year’s Moonrise Kingdom, he was a University of Texas graduate sharing an apartment with brothers Luke and Owen Wilson. Before Matt Zoller Seitz became TV critic for New York magazine and Vulture.com, plus…
Walking into Texas Theatre last night, my friends and I formed an unlikely alliance. A Cathy cartoon, flamingo and Shari Lewis abandoned East Dallas for Oak Cliff, largely thanks to a curious week of Instagram photos spit out by the resurrected art house. They were really hyping this screening of…
One of the tragedies of the Internet age is that sometimes movies get attention for all the wrong reasons. When Abdellatif Kechiche (Secret of the Grain) debuted Blue Is the Warmest Color in Cannes in May, the festival jury was so taken with the film and its two lead performances…
She was a lonely princess. He was a cocky civilian. And after she escaped the palace, the unlikely couple fell in love. It’s the plot of Roman Holiday and — according to this soapy romance from director Oliver Hirschbiegel — the true-enough story of the last two years of Princess…
Recently, Anne Washburn’s astonishing Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play wrapped up a sold-out run at Playwrights Horizons in New York. I saw the show’s world premiere in June 2012 at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., where I write about theater. It was one of the most imaginative and…
It’s a dumbfounding irony that the fiction of the “entitled, selfish millennial” was invented by Baby Boomers. The generation that created Saturday Night Live and National Lampoon grew up to be weirdly deaf to irony, and probably won’t even get what a damning metaphor Last Vegas accidentally turns out to…
The title All Is Lost promises despair, especially with Robert Redford looking so stolid and weathered and still-got-it golden on the poster. Could this near-silent, you-are-there survival story be another of Redford’s yawps of boomer gloom? Another complaint, like The Company You Keep, about the realization that the world we…
It’s almost a relief that Ender’s Game has turned out to be a glum bore onscreen, a far-future cadets-in-space military drama whose pretensions to moral inquiry boil down to the guilt a kid may feel after stepping on an anthill. If the film had turned out grand, like the best…
