If you’ve ever loved a terrible person, Mike Leigh’s quietly sensational Mr. Turner — a biopic, of sorts, covering the last 25 years of the life of the great 19th-century British painter J.M.W. Turner — is the movie for you. In his seascapes and landscapes, Turner found the perfect visual…
Describing Ava DuVernay’s quietly remarkable Selma to a friend, I caught myself referring to the civil rights era as a historical event, a thing of the past, and then backtracked. The killing of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Tamir Rice at the hands of police officers — not to mention…
Paul Thomas Anderson was making serious movies long before he started making “serious” movies, ponderous works of certified art like There Will Be Blood and The Master. His earliest pictures, like Hard Eight and Boogie Nights, and even the later Magnolia, were wily, imperfect, vibrating with life like yeast springing…
Without dropping spoilers right and left, how do I explain that I’m completely baffled by the Spierig Brothers’ retro-futuristic thriller Predestination? So the she that’s really a he is the earlier version of the he we meet later on, and the later version of the she who shows up near…
All you need to know about Taken 3 is that Liam Neeson survives an explosive car crash — twice. Director Olivier Megaton even rewinds the second blast to show us how his hero escaped. It still doesn’t make sense. But who cares? The Taken franchise is rooted in implausibilities, specifically…
Here’s an idea. Maybe the government should torture terrorists with three hours of The Bachelor (including a red carpet arrival of past Bachelors and Bachelorettes) and then we’ll see if they learn their lesson. Last night was the premiere of The Bachelor and our eyes were graced with 30 women…
Did you wake up this morning with an extra hop in your step? Did you put an extra creamer in your coffee? Did you sing extra loudly in the shower? We’re sure you did. We’re positive you did because today is Monday, Jan. 5, the day of the premiere of…
As the year in moviegoing draws to a close — and as critics busy themselves drawing up lists and handing out awards — it seems time at last to look ahead. Here are the 10 films to get excited about over the year to come. 1. Jauja (Dir. Lisandro Alonso)…
How did reality TV treat Dallas this year, you might be asking yourself, those around you or your trusted Dallas arts blog. Oh, God. Seriously, why would you ask that? How did Al Roker’s bowel movements treat him during his visit to the White House? It’s something similar to that…
In Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, Navy SEAL Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) — an astoundingly talented marksman credited with over 160 confirmed kills in Iraq — runs into a fellow veteran at a mechanic’s shop between deployments. The soldier shows Kyle an artificial leg and thanks him for saving his life…
In Rupert Wyatt’s highball-cool reworking of Karel Reisz’s 1974 The Gambler, Mark Wahlberg does not play a cop, does not shoot bad guys with a gun and does not spend considerable time shirtless (though we do see him sulking in a bathtub, and there’s a fleeting wet T-shirt moment, too)…
Before worrying ourselves over its qualities as an adaptation, or its findings as an experiment in just how much tumpety-tump parump-pa-bump the human mind can endure, let’s take a moment to marvel that Rob Marshall’s Into the Woods even exists — as a PG from Disney, no less! No matter…
There’s something curiously airless about director Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken, the story of real-life Olympian and WWII P.O.W. Louis Zamperini. Early on, Louis (Jack O’Connell) and his fellow American soldiers are zipping through the golden skies, dogfighting with Japanese planes, and, though the B-24’s doors are open and the wind is…
“Politics really isn’t my specialty,” says Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) to a naval commander (Charles Dance) in an early job interview scene in Morten Tyldum’s choppy biopic The Imitation Game. Yet no less than Winston Churchill would credit Turing as the main cause of the Allies’ victory over the Nazis…
Here are movie moments from 2014 I’ll never forget: Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s sad pop tart smacking her ass in Beyond the Lights, the sickroom choked with flowers in Michel Gondry’s Mood Indigo, Oscar Isaac and Kirsten Dunst’s Greek island all-nighter in The Two Faces of January, and the entire soundtrack of…
“If everything were great, nothing would be great.” That line, from Scott Coffey’s smart and sweetly entertaining Adult World, is one of my favorite bits of movie dialogue this year, not least because it’s applicable to every movie genre — actually, every genre of everything. But in the movie world…
If the movies have taught us anything, it’s that Christmas is a time for miracles. Days after Sony Pictures announced that no one could see Seth Rogen’s and James Franco’s movie The Interview because some hackers threatened to blow up the world for daring to make a joke about beloved…
Photo by Mark PokornyTalk some sense into ’em, Bilbo.Village Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl and LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson discuss the third-and-final Hobbit movie: The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, in this special bonus episode of the Voice Film Club podcast. As always, send barbs, jabs,…
Village Voice film critic Stephanie Zacharek and LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson run down their ten favorite/best/top/whatever movies of 2014, along with Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl…
BY MICHAEL ATKINSON Call it Stone Age materialism, but I still think movies are worth owning in physical forms you can hold, shelve and collect, and therefore worth giving as gifts. Fuck the Cloud — who knows when Hulu will get sold to Google or when Netflix decides to narrow…
We begin this week’s Voice Film Club podcast with a strange story about Giles Corey, who famously said, “More weight!” as stones were laid upon him during his witch trial. The end of the year is sort of like that for film critics, who are pressed upon with all the…
The Alamo Drafthouse in Richardson captured the attention of an angry America by scheduling a screening of Team America: World Police in place of The Interview starring Seth Rogen and James Franco that was canned by Sony Pictures. Now it appears that Paramount Pictures doesn’t want America to see the…
