There’s probably only one humanist film that opens with the words, “Merry Christmas Eve, bitch!” accompanied by the proffering of a single, sprinkle-dusted doughnut. In Sean Baker’s Tangerine, best friends, transgender women and prostitutes Sin-Dee and Alexandra (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor) catch up at a doughnut joint on…
Here’s a shocker: In Pixels, his latest, Adam Sandler plays a stunted man-child who turns out to be very, very special. That’s his ecological niche: the Manic Potbellied Dream Dork, or, if you prefer, the fragile Sand-Man. Sandler films have predictable scripts: In two hours or less, he’ll transform from…
“Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow,” declared Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In the case of Jimmy Gralton, she took bites and spat him out a couple times. It’s tempting to say some people never learn, but, as played by…
The opening of Antoine Fuqua’s Southpaw, shot in gritty, grayed-out tones, is a grim harbinger: A fighter getting ready for the ring holds up his meaty paws for the ritualistic wrapping of gauze and tape. His gloves are slipped over the wrappings, and then they’re taped on too — but…
The opening of Antoine Fuqua’s Southpaw, shot in gritty, grayed-out tones, is a grim harbinger: A fighter getting ready for the ring holds up his meaty paws for the ritualistic wrapping of gauze and tape. His gloves are slipped over the wrappings, and then they’re taped on too — but…
Few networks are as willing to bet on new voices as Comedy Central. The network’s hustling approach to original programming has yielded such breakout hits as Broad City, Inside Amy Schumer, and Key & Peele — some of the freshest and most distinctive shows of the last few years. Just three…
Long gone are the days when depictions of reporters in movies were reduced to a fedora with a white “Press” card tucked into the bow. We have Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in All The President’s Men and Peter Finch’s epic cry of “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take…
The problem with clamoring for more woman-led comedies is that actual comedy may be the thing that ends up being left by the wayside. Tina Fey, among others, has railed against the boneheaded dictum that women can’t be funny. But in the current climate of watchfulness — one in which…
We may not need another hero, but true believers don’t need to shrink-ray their expectations. Ant-Man is the first Marvel film — and the first of this summer’s pixels-go-kablooey time-wasters — to get better as it goes. The filmmakers save their biggest, wiggiest ideas for the climaxes, where they wittily…
Above all else, a movie built around a star promises presence, and in Bill Condon’s Mr. Holmes that promise is dual: Here’s 100 or so minutes with the great Ian McKellen, for once not casting spells, controlling magnetism or classing up script pages of expositional gobbledygook. It’s not his job,…
Dallas: listen up. Another film festival is coming at ya. Thursday, the 14th Asian Film Festival of Dallas kicks off for for eight days of some of the best Asian cinema you will not see at a theater near you. This is one of those festivals where you get to…
While Judd Apatow and Amy Schumer’s new movie Trainwreck is “occasionally very funny, it also feels carefully constructed to make its points, chief among them that men can get away with all kinds of bad or crazy behavior that women can’t,” writes Village Voice film critic Stephanie Zacharek in her…
Hollywood lives by the simple, sad axiom “Where there’s money, there’s more money,” which is how we get remakes of movies that sometimes shouldn’t have been made in the first place, two Spider-Man reboots within five years and a Star Wars franchise that ensures our children’s children will revere George…
The death of Amy Winehouse, in July 2011, at age 27, was one of the first great tragedies of 21st-century pop music, an event — like the deaths of Tupac Shakur and Kurt Cobain in the last decade of the 20th — that emphasized the jarring contrast between the fragility…
The first time I watched Richard Elfman’s Forbidden Zone, I lasted 13 minutes and 32 seconds. I know this because I made sure to jot it down when I turned it off. The movie isn’t horrible by any means — in fact, it’s a rarity of cinema worth your time…
For more than 30 seasons combined, men and women seeking mates — or seeking something, anyway — have competed for love on The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. You can count on one hand how many relationships spawned on the shows have worked out, but long odds didn’t keep about 200…
The upcoming Amy Winehouse documentary Amy is one of the best music docs Village Voice film critic Stephanie Zacharek has ever seen, and she explains why to Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl and LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson this week. Also this week: The confusing (yet really, really enjoyable)…
After 12 years on the air, The Daily Show With Jon Stewart became required viewing during the Dubya years, when much of the nation was desperate to look to almost anyone else for political leadership. The Comedy Central series offered nightly catharsis in five- or eight-minute bursts, voicing the anger and…
Five films into the franchise, Terminator: Genisys feels like a VHS cassette that’s been rewound and recorded over for 21 years. Director Alan Taylor (of the unmemorable Thor: The Dark World) gives us images — a thumbs-up, an abandoned factory, a liquid-metal cop smashing through the windshield of a car…
Steven Soderbergh’s 2012 Magic Mike was a cocktease. The ads tempted audiences with sweaty chests and thrusting crotches, but after Soderbergh lured us into his all-male strip club, he turned on the lights to show us the squalor. His hunks were drugged and morally decayed. The women — the sober…
Crystal Moselle’s documentary The Wolfpack is a Manhattan fable about fear. Two decades ago, a Hare Krishna, conspiracy theorist and self-described god named Oscar Angulo moved from Peru to a public housing tenement on the Lower East Side with his American bride, Susanne, whom he’d met and wooed on the…
When Ser Steak and Spirits’ executive chef was updating the restaurant’s dessert menu, he thought kicking it old school was the best bet. For whatever reason, the Millionaire Pie disappeared from the menu, but after much popular demand, the chef felt it was time to bring it back. “Why come…
