In our film section this week, we take a look at some of the coming summer movies that will offer us a chance to cool off in the dark for a bit. Here on Mixmaster, asked a few local luminaries in the film scene to share some of their favorite…
In our film section this week, we take a look at some of the coming summer movies that will offer us a chance to cool off in the dark for a bit. In that vein, Mixmaster asked Alice to offer a mom’s take on the joy of summer family films…
Summer has officially arrived, bringing along with it a drove of blockbuster films that are usually less than memorable. If you’re looking to while away the hours in a dark, chilly theater without watching a mind-numbing movie, look no further than the Oak Cliff Film Festival. In its third year,…
On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, the Village Voice’s Alan Schestuhl and L.A. Weekly’s Amy Nicholson are joined by special guest Chris Klimek to discuss the strange career of Tom Cruise, the new X-Men movie, and why Han Solo should die…
A romance ripped from the pages of Deuteronomy, Frank Coraci’s Blended posits that the best reason for a woman with sons and a man with daughters to get married is that they can take care of each other’s kids. Quel pragmatisme! In the world of this sitcom love story, men…
When the season premiere of I Wanna Marry Harry airs tonight, America will watch 12 women compete for the love and affection of Prince Harry. OK, not really. That’s just what the show leads the contestants, including three women from the Dallas area, to believe…
In the current issue of the Observer, I take a long look at the creation of AMC’s new drama, Halt and Catch Fire, which was inspired by a local software salesman and co-created by that salesman’s son, Plano-born screenwriter Chris Cantwell. You should totally read it. Really. But you could…
In Chef, Jon Favreau’s newest movie opening in Dallas theaters today, the title character (played by Favreau) walks through the streets of Santa Monica and stops to stare at a street performer’s puppet. It’s a rock ‘n’ roll skeleton marionette named Mr. Bonetangles, and as the chef pauses to watch…
What-could-have-been has to be a tough subject for the town of Waxahachie. Its biggest claim to fame these days is being the birthplace of Thomas Everett Blasingame, who when he died in 1989 at age 91 was the oldest working cowboy American West. That’s not much to hang a town’s…
Godzilla is the movie monster with the mostest. King Kong may be just one gorilla-chest-hair behind, but not even the greatest of apes can quite match the half-dragon, half-dinosaur who first stomped and chomped his way through Tokyo in Ishiro Honda’s 1954 extravaganza Godzilla. In that picture — even more…
Chef, the back-to-his-roots indie flick from Jon Favreau (Iron Man), is to modern foodie culture as his own Swingers is to ’90s swing revival. Favreau plays Carl Casper, a culinary bad boy, barreling egotist and divorced father with a chef’s knife tattoo stretching down his right forearm and “El Jefe”…
Looking for a chance to shout “Only in America”? Only in America — or an American movie — could the story of the first two Indian players to be signed to a Major League Baseball team get spun as an L.A. sports agent’s journey toward realizing the importance of family…
“This is the first generation that is expected to live shorter lives than their parents,” says Katie Couric, the narrator of Fed Up. It’s an infuriating statement given both the preventability of that outcome and the institutional opposition to the solutions, the primary conflict that drives the film. For the…
It’s day two of SXSW, and Mother Nature, tired of people staring at her badge, is revolting. She has painted Austin a morose gray, and a light drizzle is growing into an angry downpour. By the time a herd of black SUVs stampedes the Hotel St. Cecilia around dusk, a…
If you’ve ever loved a terrible person, Mike Leigh’s quietly sensational Cannes competition entry 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…
Greetings from Cannes! It’s an unwritten rule — maybe it should even be a written one -– that no one who is lucky enough to come to Cannes for the film festival, now in its 67th year, should, in any way, shape, or form, complain about being here. But may…
Cannes, on festival weekends, is wild: Every night is busy on the Croisette, the long boulevard that winds along the shore and past the Palais des Festivals, the large complex where most of the festival action — including screenings, premieres and red-carpet walking — take place. But the crowds swell…
If all of Cannes isn’t it love with Channing Tatum right now, it should be. During the photo-call for Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher on Monday afternoon, Tatum — relaxed, affable, light on his feet despite being seriously built — turned toward the press and took a few photographs of the corps…
2014 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. & Legendary Pictures Productions LLCGodzilla, opening May 16.Village Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl and L.A. Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson recommend Neighbors (Seth Rogen, Rose Byrne, Zac Efron) and Godzilla (Bryan Cranston, Godzilla) and are joined by special guest, James Beard Award-winning L.A. Weekly restaurant…
Every movie goer knows the pain and anguish of having to shell out money for a movie and realizing that the cash would have been better spent if they threw it into a fire. The modicum amount of heat that burning the cash could produce would give more to a…
Neighbors Won’t Haze You
Nicholas Stoller’s hilarious Neighbors splashes into summer with the satisfying swish-plop-hooray of a winning beer pong serve, making the director, who also wrote March’s Muppets Most Wanted, the first filmmaker in history to simultaneously have in theaters both a kiddie flick and an R-rated comedy where two men sword-fight with…
Everything in the opening scenes of Jeremy Saulnier’s nerve-wracking revenge drama Blue Ruin is the color of a bruise, from the ocean to the bullet-hole-pocked 1996 Pontiac Bonneville that homeless near-mute Dwight (Macon Blair) calls home. It’s fitting. Dwight has never overcome the pain of his parents’ murder when he…
