Smarter Than the Average Emerson argued that each flourish and tendril of a work of art has its exact corollary in the mind of the artist, that creative expression is always, in its way, a sort of autobiography: Want to know the person? Look at their works. But Ralph Waldo…
Here’s the pipsqueak who has hauled himself up into a sharp-dressed leading man. Here’s the comic who’s boundlessly inventive in his swearing but also suave and commanding in pursuit of love, the motormouth horndog who yawps about like a puppy on fire but can melt your mother’s heart with his…
BY INKOO KANG Among many other things, Girls has always been great satire, lampooning with scolding empathy the callowness, narcissism and insufferableness of early-to-mid twentysomethings who are privileged enough to spend their post-grad years making mistake after mistake with no serious consequences. But the HBO dramedy’s fourth season, in which…
The sudden wave of earthquakes that swept across North Texas in the past couple of days also sparked a wave of concern about the practice of fracking in the natural gas industry. The earthquakes gave us quite a scare as well, but not because of fracking. We’ve been assured by…
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,…
