Ravenous is a film-shaped UFO: It’s so delightfully weird that its very existence defies logic. Imagine a film that makes A Modest Proposal–style satire out of Dracula’s gothic horror tropes in the spaghetti western milieu of The Great Silence. It’s a pitch-black comedy about Manifest Destiny and cannibal frontiersmen. Set…
If you ever have days when you prefer animals to human beings, How to Train Your Dragon 2 is your kind of movie. In some ways the second entry in this animated franchise is inferior to the first, released in 2010: The plot is needlessly busy, and much of the…
You have to hand it to James McAvoy, who has made a career out of his amiable, boyish good looks; in Filth, he destroys that image. As Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson, he’s a booze-bloated, greasy wreck who appears about 20 years older, all busted capillaries and shit-eating grin. He’s not…
There’s still one kind of dread that today’s genre filmmakers can reliably stir up: that fear that everything we’ve been watching onscreen is going to be upended by some last-minute twist, that all the clues and portents we’ve puzzled over will be swept away in favor of some revelation so…
There’s much to be astonished by in the story of how the Supreme Court was goaded in slapping down Proposition 8, California’s gay marriage ban. One of the most surprising: that in courtroom after courtroom, be they state, district or superior, Charles Cooper and the proponents of the ban never…
“Wherever you live in this world, basically . . . you are alone. Even if [we] have support systems, we’re really alone.” Those words, shorn of sentimentality, are offered—and received—as motherly balm in the documentary When I Walk. Filmmaker Jason DaSilva, having turned his camera on himself to capture the…
The Fault in Our Stars made heaps of money at the box office, and film critics Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek wonder if a recent piece declaring that adults should feel ashamed to read young adult novels has any weight to it. They also talk about The Immigrant and film…
Some fans express love for their favorite entertainment franchise by endlessly watching, reading or buying the things that spawned their love for it. Ghostbusters fans go a step beyond, especially in Dallas. Thirty years ago this Saturday, the blockbuster comedy became a phenomenon in spite of the fact that no…
In 1986, peaceniks were mad at Tom Cruise. That year, the Navy thanked Top Gun for boosting enlistment another 20,000 recruits. Since then, he’s made more critiques of military than advertisements, most of which (Lions for Lambs, Born on the Fourth of July, The Last Samurai, Valkyrie) j’accuse bad leadership…
The most radical thing about this eco-terrorism drama is its quiet patience and formal vigor. While most studio pictures slap together their images with all the care of a grocery-store deli clerk assembling the ham and carrots on a cheap party platter, Kelly Reichardt, the director of Night Moves, favors…
Cancer, so costly in real life, can be thrown around pretty cheaply in fiction, which is why most cautious readers and moviegoers are wary of it as a plot element. Call it the Love Story syndrome. But the presence of mortal illness has always been a staple of romantic melodrama,…
The grand old dirty pope of midnight-movie voodoo and post-’60s turn-on, drop-out mythopoeia returns with a vengeance, in his autumnal phase and with, surprise, a personal look backward at his own childhood. The Dance of Reality may be Alejandro Jodorowsky’s best film, and certainly, in a filmography top-heavy with freak-show…
When first-time director Gillian Robespierre’s festival favorite Obvious Child makes its theatrical debut in June, it could herald the sweetest, funniest, most unassuming cinematic revolution in years. Starring former Saturday Night Live bit player Jenny Slate in a ravishing star turn, the romantic comedy quickly grabbed attention at Sundance for…
When Phil Lord and Chris Miller pitched their idea for a 21 Jump Street movie, a film everyone thought was, at best, a moronic moneymaker, they had one bold proposal: “What if the twist is that we try to make it really good?” says Lord. “That’s basically a summary of…
Multihyphenate actor Clark Gregg understands that hard work and perseverance don’t necessarily pay off in Hollywood. Since moving to Los Angeles in 1992, the star of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has directed two feature films and scripted three, none of which are the work he’s best known for. Gregg knows…
One of the biggest selling points of 21 Jump Street, the 2012 TV-remake comedy, turned out to be its seemingly unscripted lunacy, the way it put Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill in police-shorts outfits and let them riff on their characters’ mutual ineptitude. Sometimes you need a little flapdoodle, and…
The Western genre isn’t entirely comprised of spaghetti or John Wayne talking out the side of his mouth: From its earliest days, filmmakers were putting a comic spin on stories set on the dusty trail, with the genre hitting its apex between the mid ’70s and mid ’80s. We’ve gathered…
We’re still adjusting to Seth MacFarlane as a big-screen star. Not just because his breakneck absurdist humor often demands viewers pause and rewind, but because the man himself looks like a hand-inked cartoon, with his black hair, pupil-less eyes and an alabaster baby face that, lacking cheekbones that could carve…
Boil Maleficent down to one newt’s nose-size piece of advice and you’d get this: Don’t dump Angelina Jolie. It’s not a problem most mortals will face, but as seen through director Robert Stromberg’s lens, the antlered arch-villain of Sleeping Beauty is a sympathetic scorned woman, equal parts Gloria Gaynor, Princess…
We’ve been talking about AMC’s new show Halt and Catch Fire for months. If we sound a bit excited, it’s because we are. In fact, we’ve been nerding out so hard, we convinced our cool friends over at Sundown at the Granada to invite us over to watch it on…
If you haven’t seen the hashtag #YesAllWomen pop up in your newsfeed this week, you have the wrong friends. In the wake of the Elliot Rodger shootings, women across the globe began to stand together, sharing harassment and assault experiences, in order to draw attention to the continued reality of…
Jim Henson created some of film’s most lovable characters. Kermit the Frog, Gonzo and the gang only grow more endearing with age. But Henson also created quite a few fantastical monsters that scared the bejeezus out of little kids. The creatures in the mystical, often scary world of Henson’s The…
