We Play Monopoly With 99 Homes Star Michael Shannon

Michael Shannon isn’t a stickler for rules. In his career, he’s ignored most of them, especially the mandate that a theater-trained, Oscar-nominated actor should shun the large roles in dumb movies that let him afford the smart ones. (See: Kangaroo Jack, Bad Boys II, Premium Rush, Man of Steel.) Shannon’s…

Steve Jobs Digs at the Heart of the Apple Icon

Aaron Sorkin opens up a new desktop icon with Steve Jobs, a briskly busy, talkative companion piece to the Newsroom and Moneyball writer’s Mark Zuckerberg-centric The Social Network. Adapting Walter Isaacson’s biography of the Apple innovator, Sorkin’s latest is less a novel exposé than a distinctly Sorkinian dramatization of well-known…

Crimson Peak Wasn’t Made for Times Like Ours

Mia Wasikowska is proof of reincarnation. The Australian actress must be possessed by the spirit of Lillian Gish. At 22 — the same age that Gish starred in Birth of a Nation — Wasikowska became a bankable name playing the lead in Tim Burton’s garish Alice in Wonderland. In the…

9 Best Horror Movie Moments in 2015 (Spoilers)

It’s got to be one of the most challenging things to achieve in cinema history: How do you truly frighten the hell out of a movie audience? These days, in the Internet age, wherein we meticulously dissect films for accurate representations of reality and feasibility, it’s hilariously difficult. But when…

The Lone Star Film Festival Announces Its Lineup and It’s Big

Let’s get right down to business: the Lone Star Film Festival announced its 2015 lineup, and it’s big. Here’s a fresh reminder from last year: they screened It Follows, The Babadook, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, The Great Invisible, The Imitation Game, Mr. Turner, Wild, Winter Sleep, and…

Damon’s Got More Spirit Than The Martian

Desperation, anxiety, stubbornly saying yes to survival: If grand struggles are your thing, there are plenty in Ridley Scott’s The Martian, based on Andy Weir’s popular novel, which was first self-published in 2011 and then picked up by Crown in 2014. In both novel and movie, American astronaut Mark Watney…

Austrian Horror Flick Goodnight Mommy Has Promise, But Cheats

Since 1963, the Austrian birthrate has halved. You can’t blame Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s Goodnight Mommy for the trend, but it sure isn’t helping. The quiet creepshow follows 11-year-old twins Lukas and Elias (Lukas and Elias Schwarz, great), who suspect their mom (Susanne Wuest) wishes they hadn’t been born…

A Brilliant Young Mind Doesn’t Master Math, but It Aces Life

The minds of math and science geniuses have long fascinated the makers of crowd-pleasing narrative features, which is curious, as the complexities that fascinate those minds are antithetical to the feelings-first bounce of popular filmmaking. The movies, having settled into candied naturalism, already struggle to suggest interiority, even of characters…

No Course Credit for De Niro in The Intern

Some veteran filmmakers try to capture the younger generation and fail to get it right, coming up with characters and faux with-it dialogue that invite lots of “Oh, Mom!” eye-rolling. That’s not the problem with writer-director Nancy Meyers’s The Intern, in which retiree Robert De Niro finds meaning in life…

Don’t Be Afraid to Feel in Zhang Yimou’s Coming Home

In the mid-20th century, movie audiences understood the value of a good melodrama: A picture like Now, Voyager or Black Narcissus or almost anything by Douglas Sirk could be an urn into which you could pour your own unarticulated feelings of loss and loneliness. The heightened, unrealistic intensity of those movies…

Charlie Kaufman Has Directed His Second Masterpiece

Charlie Kaufman is a cartographer of the soul. You can picture him hunched over parchment accurately inking each dark river and, off to the side, cautioning that there be dragons. What makes Kaufman cinema’s best psychoanalyst is a contradiction. He sees people for who we are — hurtful, hopeful, lovely,…

Black Mass Is Stronger than Depp’s Performance

James “Whitey” Bulger was more like a character from a 17th-century folktale than a late-20th-century criminal, the sort of figure who’d murder innocents on wooded roadways and then, with a shrug, toss their bloody bones to hungry wild dogs. In ’80s and early-’90s Boston, he headed a criminal syndicate known…

Film Podcast #96: Michael Shannon is a Stern Monopoly Player

LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson found out first-hand that Michael Shannon is a pretty stern Monopoly player during a recent game with the actor, who portrays a tortured Orlando real-estate baron in the upcoming 99 Homes. Nicholson and Village Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl open this week’s Voice Film…

Gorgeous Wolf Totem Holds to Nature-Adventure Formula

The success of Jean-Jacques Annaud’s handsome lupine adventure Wolf Totem relies in large part on the ratio between wolf and totem. There are wolves — those howling, majestic hunters of the Mongolian grasslands — and then there are the many things they stand for: freedom, teamwork, the delicate harmony of…

The Look of Silence Takes a Second Look at a Genocide

In 2012, documentary filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer made a splash with The Act of Killing, in which he sought out members of Indonesian killing squads, individuals who murdered thousands of innocent citizens accused of being communists after a military takeover in 1965, and invited them to re-enact their crimes in the…