Stephanie Zacharek

Stephanie Zacharek was the principal film critic at the Village Voice from 2013 to 2015. She is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle and of the National Society of Film Critics. In 2015 Zacharek was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

Her work also appeared in the publications of the Voice’s film partner, Voice Media Group: LA Weekly, Denver Westword, Phoenix New Times, Miami New Times, Broward-Palm Beach New Times, Houston Press, Dallas Observer and OC Weekly.

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The Wolf of Wall Street Attacks Excess with Excess

By Stephanie Zacharek
Dec 26, 2013

Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street is the kind of movie directors make when they wield money, power and a not inconsiderable degree of arrogance. Sprawling and extravagant, it revels in all manner of excess, including sexual debauchery, hearty abuse of liquor and Quaaludes, even dwarf-tossing. Its antihero, the...
Inside Llewyn Davis: The Coens Triumph in Old Greenwich Village

By Stephanie Zacharek
Dec 19, 2013

Folk music is supposed to be the music of the people. Yet at the heart of Joel and Ethan Coen's Inside Llewyn Davis, set in New York in the winter of 1961, is a folksinger with no feeling for people. Llewyn Davis, played by Oscar Isaac, is a broke, rumpled...
American Hustle Is a Con To Fall For

By Stephanie Zacharek
Dec 19, 2013

The best movies about con artists work a bit of flimflammery themselves. They're not necessarily dishonest; they just can't resist making the truth shinier than it is in real life. There may not be much behind the sparkling tinsel curtain of David O. Russell's extraordinarily entertaining American Hustle. But what...
The Anchorman Saga's Secret? Will Ferrell's Generosity

By Stephanie Zacharek
Dec 19, 2013

The audience that shows up for a comedy is the most tyrannical of all. Their very presence is the equivalent of a schoolyard bully's challenge: "Go ahead — make me laugh." Which is why there's danger in following up a hit comedy with a sequel, even nine years after the...
The Actors Almost Save Out of the Furnace

By Stephanie Zacharek
Dec 5, 2013

The life of Russell Baze, a steelworker in a Pennsylvania town just outside of Pittsburgh, may be drab and dreary, but he's a good, hardworking man with a loving girlfriend. His younger brother, Rodney, has it tougher: A war vet suffering from PTSD, he hasn't been able to readjust to...
Spike Lee's Soulless Oldboy Has No Reason to Live

By Stephanie Zacharek
Nov 28, 2013

A favorite pastime of those who love Asian film is to carp about Hollywood's annoying tendency to lay claim to and defile their favorites. But Spike Lee's Oldboy is the remake that came too late, so benign and unmemorable that not even people who loved Park Chan-wook's 2003 original will...
The Book Thief Probably Should Have Stayed a Book

By Stephanie Zacharek
Nov 21, 2013

It had to happen: There's so much voiceover narration in today's movies, so much needless verbal play-by-play, that it was only a matter of time before somebody made a picture narrated by that life of the party himself, Death. The Grim Reaper delivers the opening monologue of The Book Thief,...
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire Is as Much Setup as Treat

By Stephanie Zacharek
Nov 21, 2013

It says something that two of the biggest sensations in young adult literature over the past 10 years have featured heroines who keep more than one guy on the line at a time. No longer do the genre's bright young women sit around waiting for one Mr. Right to notice...
The Best Man Holiday Brings Back the Black Ensemble Comedy

By Stephanie Zacharek
Nov 14, 2013

From the mid-1990s to somewhere around 2006, Hollywood bankrolled a number of romantic entertainments targeted to — though not made exclusively for — black audiences. Pictures like Love Jones, Brown Sugar, How Stella Got Her Groove Back and Something New provided a showcase for actors of color, a refreshing change...
AIDS Comes to Texas -- and McConaughey -- in Dallas Buyers Club

By Stephanie Zacharek
Nov 7, 2013

Weight-loss and weight-gain performances are tricky things. Robert De Niro's heavily mannered turn in Raging Bull just has to be great — he gained 60 pounds for it, didn't he? For his role in The Machinist, Christian Bale dropped to a sub-skeletal 122 pounds; he looked like a walking, talking...
About Time Dishes the (Same Old) Lessons of the Ages

By Stephanie Zacharek
Nov 7, 2013

Richard Curtis has so much to tell us about life. Seize the day! Show people you love them before it's too late! Don't let the right one get away! His movies — those he writes, directs or both — are so packed with info-feeling that they become restless jumbles of...
Blue Is the Warmest Color: There's Much More than Sex on Screen

By Stephanie Zacharek
Oct 31, 2013

One of the tragedies of the Internet age is that sometimes movies get attention for all the wrong reasons. When Abdellatif Kechiche (Secret of the Grain) debuted Blue Is the Warmest Color in Cannes in May, the festival jury was so taken with the film and its two lead performances...
12 Years a Slave Prizes Radiance Over Life

By Stephanie Zacharek
Oct 24, 2013

Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave is the movie for people who think they're too smart for The Butler. The story it tells, a true one, is horrifying: In 1841, Solomon Northup, a free, educated black man from Saratoga, New York, was kidnapped, sold into slavery and transported to Louisiana...
As Captain Phillips, Tom Hanks Goes Where Few Actors Have Dared

By Stephanie Zacharek
Oct 10, 2013

Tom Hanks has built a career out of playing aggressively noble roles, so it's only natural to want to see him taken down a peg. But it's no fun to watch him suffer at the hands of Somali pirates in Paul Greengrass' true-life adventure Captain Phillips. Hanks plays the commander...
Gravity Is Massively Effective

By Stephanie Zacharek
Oct 3, 2013

Some movies are so tense and deeply affecting that they shave years off your life as you're watching, only to give back that lost time, and more, at the end. Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity is one of those movies. Sandra Bullock and George Clooney play astronauts — one a medical engineer,...
With Enough Said, Fall for James Gandolfini One Last Time

His excellent last film leaves you yearning for more of him.

By Stephanie Zacharek
Sep 26, 2013

When a relatively young actor dies suddenly, as James Gandolfini did in June, it's tempting to wonder about the roles he'll never get to play. When we didn't know we'd be losing him so soon, it was always fun to see Gandolfini show up, a casual surprise: In 2012 alone...
Rush's Racers Draw New Life from Ron Howard

There's nothing formulaic in this race-car biopic.

By Stephanie Zacharek
Sep 26, 2013

It's 1976, a year when all the groovy girls are traipsing around in tiny suede skirts and all the cool guys have Badfinger hair. One of those guys was English racing driver James Hunt, the charismatic rapscallion who won that year's Formula One World Championship — the embroidered badge on...
Dancing With Don Jon

Joseph Gordon-Levitt triumphs over online porn.

By Stephanie Zacharek
Sep 26, 2013

To paraphrase the Bee Gees, Joseph Gordon-Levitt should be dancing. He's already done it in (500) Days of Summer, where he led an exuberant ensemble routine that out-Dr Peppered any Dr Pepper commercial. Then there was his smashing Saturday Night Live re-creation of Donald O'Connor's "Make 'Em Laugh" — like...
Venice Update: Nicolas Cage and the Misery of Joe

By Stephanie Zacharek
Aug 30, 2013

As at most festivals, screenings at Venice are preceded by a recorded message asking everyone to turn off their cell phones. A very cultured-sounding lady delivers this request first in Italian and then in English. She caps off the English version with the words, "Thank you for your collaboration." My...
Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity is Lightning From the Heavens

By Stephanie Zacharek
Aug 29, 2013

The late, great Elmore Leonard advised writers never to open a book with weather. Does a lightning storm count? Last evening I was welcomed to Venice, where I'm just settling in for the 2013 edition of the city's film festival, with a spectacular lightning storm over the Grand Canal. This...
Even Abridged, Wong Kar-Wai's The Grandmaster is Epic

By Stephanie Zacharek
Aug 29, 2013

Plenty of film critics and Asian cinema aficionados care deeply that The Grandmaster, Wong Kar-wai's pointillist biopic of martial arts master Ip Man and the director's first picture in six years, will be released in the States only in a 108-minute version. The cut released in China earlier this year...
Suspense Flat-Lines in Closed Circuit

Some secrets aren't worth knowing.

By Stephanie Zacharek
Aug 29, 2013

Intricate, intelligent thrillers made specifically for grown-ups are so rare these days that it's tempting to award extra points to anyone who even scales an attempt. Tomas Alfredson's 2011 John le Carré adaptation, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, may have been the last great example of an adult thriller that refused...

Archives from 2013

Stephanie Zacharek

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