Are You Tough Enough to Be an American Ninja Warrior?

Everything looks so much easier on TV. Baldness is cured with the simple spray of a can. A methamphetamine empire can be built in an RV with school supplies. A sponge can live in a pineapple under the sea without being contaminated by off-shore drilling.  American Ninja Warrior, the NBC…

10 Reasons to See Grey Gardens at Texas Theatre

Little Edie and Big Edie were related to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Edith “Big Edie” Ewing Bouvier Beale and Edith “Little Edie” Bouvier Beale were the aunt and first cousin of the former first lady. Grey Gardens, the Long Island home of the Beales, was almost shutdown by the health department…

How Amy Schumer Became This Generation’s Latest Truth-Teller

During “Compliments,” a first-season sketch on Inside Amy Schumer, a group of female friends respond to every bit of praise with a verbal self-maiming: “I tried to look like Kate Hudson but ended up looking like a golden retriever’s dingleberry,” says one. Sighs another, “Of course I see everyone when…

5 Attractions Six Flags Should Turn into Movies

Disney has a genius way of turning large sums of money into even larger sums of money. The executives at Disney probably laugh at the size of Scrooge McDuck’s money bin for being small and unsightly as they back stroke through one the size of a college football stadium. With…

Don’t Hate Tomorrowland for Asking Us to Be Better

In a junk-food summer, Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland is a defiant carrot stick, a blockbuster adventure flick where the message is “Think smart.” It’s a deliberate phooey to the kiddie carnage of movies like Transformers and The Avengers, which frighten children about the apocalypse before they can even spell the word…

Immersive Dark Star Plunges into Giger’s Hellscapes

“This is the oldest skull I have,” the Swiss artist H.R. Giger says, showing off this prized possession the breezy way you might a set of Fiestaware. He lifts the skull and regards it. But then his speech is breathy and halting, tender with age, as he elaborates: His father…

Poltergeist, 2015: This House is Meh

Poltergeist 2015 is to Poltergeist ’82 what today’s shipped-frozen-to-the-store Pizza Hut dough is to the kneaded-on-site pies the chain’s stoned cooks tossed in the Reagan era. It’s the same kind of thing, with the same shape and some shared ingredients, but the texture’s gone limp, and there’s no sense of…

The Reinvention of Film Comedy King Judd Apatow

Two and a half years ago, Judd Apatow released This Is 40, the most personal film of his career. He was anxious. He usually is. His default setting is inward panic. “I don’t know if people can understand the pressure to be funny,” Apatow says today, “just knowing how badly…

Podcast: The ‘Mad Men’ Ending Was the Real Thing

The final episode of Mad Men was upbeat — if you enjoy the death of the counter-culture. On this special episode of the Voice Film Club podcast, Village Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl and editorial fellow Lara Zarum, along with the Voice’s TV critic Inkoo Kang, discuss the final episode…

Oak Cliff Film Festival 2015 Full Line-up Announced

When the Oak Cliff Film Festival announced their first wave of films screening next month at their fourth annual festival it was so banging it had the possibility of knocking you off your feet. Of those first five films announced, the one I’ve seen is Rick Alverson’s quietly wild Entertainment,…

Podcast: Is Pitch Perfect 2 Racist? And Mad Max Rules

Pitch Perfect 2 hit a few wrong notes for the Village Voice’s Alan Scherstuhl and special guest Monica Castillo, but LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson interpreted the film’s humor a little differently. We circle back to Sofia Vergara’s performance in Hot Pursuit, before arriving in the desert for Mad…

Pitch Perfect 2 Strains to Hit the Same Notes

Some people complain about sequels to beloved movies, while others welcome the possibility that a part deux might be even better than the first. Sometimes that happens: While The Godfather is great, The Godfather: Part II expands on its dramatic intensity without repeating any of the same tricks, and The…

The Late Albert Maysles’ Iris Embraces the Creative Life

Iris Apfel isn’t exactly a household name, unless we’re talking about very stylish households. From 1950 to 1992 Apfel ran Old World Weavers, the business she co-founded with her husband, Carl, which faithfully re-created antique textiles for use in home decorating: From grand Park Avenue drapes to demure White House…

Mad Max: Fury Road Is Two Hours of Peerless, Exhausting Gearhead Mayhem

This doesn’t feel like a film that exists. How is George Miller’s bonkers, exhausting, no-future smash-’em-up Mad Max: Fury Road not one of those almost-was boondoggles mourned and dreamed of by fans, a revered director’s impossible vision that, thanks to the un-stout hearts of studio bean-counters, never actually vaulted from…

Video: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders Show Our Clubs Editor Some Moves

Last weekend the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders saw hundreds of women high kick their way through the preliminary auditions for one of the most coveted titles in the cheerleading industry. Love ’em or hate ’em, it wasn’t difficult to talk our clubs editor, Drew Blackburn, into spending an hour with the…

Podcast: Stop Laughing At Old Movies, You $@%&ing Hipsters!

“I’m over people who think they’re funnier than the movie,” says LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson, in the wake of her recent piece, “Stop Laughing At Old Movies, You $@%&ing Hipsters.” Joining her — *in the same room, for the first time ever on the podcast* — as usual…

Witherspoon and Vergara Lift Hot Pursuit Into Hilarity

Sofía Vergara is built like an amphora, a living testament to the form ceramicists throughout the centuries have adored. In the fleet and gloriously ridiculous comedy Hot Pursuit, Vergara plays Daniella Riva, a mobster’s wife who needs to be escorted from San Antonio to Dallas, where she’ll testify against the…

Jack Black Plays Too Nice in The D Train

One of the most inspired ideas in late-middle Woody Allen pictures comes in Deconstructing Harry, a movie about how Allen loves Bergman, hates Philip Roth and isn’t quite clear on what “deconstruction” means. Allen stages passages from fiction written by the protagonist, a novelist named Harry; one features Robin Williams…