A sense of humor will take you far in life, even along a daunting stretch of the Appalachian Trail. In his hugely popular 1998 book A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson chronicled his attempt to hike the full length of the trail, from Georgia to Maine, accompanied by an…
Here’s a brief history lesson: in the 1950s, there was a little French magazine called Cahiers du Cinéma. It was written by film critics, for film critics, which the general public ate up because it taught them the theory of film and what was good and bad at the local…
Narcos, Netflix’s new drug-war docudrama, is nearly as ambitious as its central character, Pablo Escobar. Over the course of 10 dense, sprawling episodes, the series tells the 20-year history of the narcotrafficker’s rise and fall in relation to Colombia’s blood-soaked history and the U.S.’s escalating drug war, from Richard Nixon…
Last year one of the best American revenge tales Blue Ruin, funded through Kickstarter, went on to play the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the prestigious FIPRESCI Prize — the same award Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, Paul Thomas Anderson, and many great filmmakers of all time won once upon a…
Remake The Graduate today, and an adult might corner Benjamin Braddock and whisper, “Startups.” Debut director Max Joseph gives that a good shot, though the result — the EDM-fueled, drug-laced dream-crusher We Are Your Friends — is so sweaty and silly people may not notice. Like Mike Nichols, Joseph wants…
This mean and vigorous men’s adventure pulp throwback has everything going against it. It’s a late-August release whose leads, Owen Wilson and Lake Bell, tend to be the best things in movies you otherwise regret seeing. The trailers, teasing the story of a toothsome American family hunted by peasant-rebels in…
Brooke, Greta Gerwig’s latest Manhattan creation, is a hurricane gobbling up lives. She’s a singer, restaurateur, interior decorator, math coach, spinning instructor and self-described autodidact. When 18-year-old admirer Tracy (Lola Kirke), Brooke’s sister-to-be following their parents’ Thanksgiving wedding, squeaks that she wants to write short stories, Brooke devours that idea,…
There’s steady, scary thrill in the final third of Meru, the latest attempt to conquer the climb-and-tweak-the-nose-of-God mountaineering documentary, a genre that has yet to reach its apex. The terrible beauty of the Shark’s Fin point of northern India’s Mount Meru is enough to make this worth seeking out on…
Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice, along with Amy Nicholson of the LA Weekly, run down the worst and best of the movies they saw this summer, which as summers go, wasn’t so terrible! Among the best performances were those by Sam Elliott, wonderful in two movies,…
On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast: We love Guy Ritchie’s stylish, charming The Man From U.N.C.L.E., while LA Weekly film critic Amy states her case for American Ultra. We move onto Lily Tomlin’s memorable performance in Grandma (be sure to read our interview with Tomlin, too). Later, Village Voice film editor…
Here at the Dallas Observer Arts and Culture section, we are proud, sort of, we guess, to announce Another Former Bachelor Contestant Hosts A Thing And You Can Go If You Want. It’s art and culture, baby. For this edition, Dallas guy and a former Bachelor himself Sean Lowe and…
Nima Nourizadeh’s American Ultra is a bloody valentine attached to a bomb. It’s violent, brash, inventive and horrific, and perhaps the most romantic film of the year. Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart star as Mike and Phoebe, two West Virginia stoners blissed out on weed and each other. “We’re the…
Is it in honor of its subject that the high-flying doc Being Evel indulges so often in hilarious overstatement? “He opened the door and invited people to buy a ticket to watch truth,” one talking head insists, somehow keeping his face straight. Another speaks of how in the early 1970s…
“You could make five different N.W.A movies. We made the one we wanted to make.” That’s director F. Gary Gray during an audience Q&A after a recent screening of Straight Outta Compton, the long-awaited N.W.A movie. In our review, Amy Nicholson writes that there’s much more to the group’s story:…
When we heard Exxxotica was coming to town, we imagined a cross between Willa Wonka’s Chocolate Factory and the Playboy Mansion. Lights would be low, porn stars would be just as attractive in person, walls would be draped in velvet and around every corner we’d find a Champagne fountain. (Basically,…
In a world gone mad for superhero movies, what chance does the light spy caper have? Audiences will put total faith in a guy wearing a red metal suit, but the soft woolen folds of the bespoke kind barely register. When a whole city can be blasted to smithereens thanks…
Less than a generation ago, Yonkers, New York became the face of segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation in my backyard. A federal court order to construct 200 units of low-income residences east of the Saw Mill Parkway, i.e., in the white part of town, led to riots and bombings, death…
Meryl Streep in a comedic role is one of the few good things in Ricki and the Flash, and the N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton sands down many of the rough corners of the ground-breaking rap group’s controversial history. On this week’s Voice Film Club, Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek…
In the holy trinity of N.W.A., each icon had a power: Dr. Dre produced, Ice Cube wrote the words and Eazy-E was the comic relief. N.W.A.’s biopic, Straight Outta Compton, blurs those roles. Both Dre and Cube produced the film and seem to have edited the script with a red…
Even if you’re the sort who believes there can be no such thing as too much political coverage, it can’t hurt to cast a fond glance back to 1968, when only three networks — NBC, CBS, and the perennial laggard ABC — jockeyed for the attention of the American public…
At the start of Woody Allen’s campus comedy Irrational Man, caddish professor Abe Lucas (Joaquin Phoenix) drives up to a new school that’s already steeled itself for his arrival. “Of course, my reputation — a reputation — preceded me,” admits Abe. Such defensiveness also applies to his tabloid-attacked director, who…
1. Really, it’s all in one line of dialogue. Late in Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four, that ever-lovin’ man-mountain Benjamin J. Grimm sets himself at last to the good work of bad-guy punching. As he rushes off to pound Doctor Doom, he mutters, “This is what I do.” He’s resigned to…
