I could write a Shakespearean sonnet about each film on my Top 10 of 2013, but we know we’re all here for the agreements and arguments. (Plus, have you tried writing about Joe Swanberg in iambic pentameter?) Ladies and gentlemen, let’s begin. The Act of Killing — The year’s best…
January! Just the time to snuggle up with a 3D swordandpectoral extravaganza. And although some of its more imaginative plot details would make Edith Hamilton blanch, Renny Harlin’s Legend of Hercules fulfills every silly, flimsy promise that it makes in the first place: There are lots of battles (albeit rather…
James, By now, your buddies have forwarded you the Reddit Ask Me Anything where a 24-year-old man with Diphallia — aka two penises — says he wants to give you a facial. Say yes. Let’s get through the superficial reasons first. This magical male unicorn (er, twonicorn?) is anonymous, which…
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Editor’s note: The author is British, so this thing is, like, authentic. And you might be saying “Hey, didn’t you run an almost identical drinking game last season?” Actually, yes! We considered writing a new one, then remembered how enraged we were by the Season Three finale and just posted…
Found footage films are an interesting art form. We don’t mean those shaky movies where the director forgot to pack a tripod. We mean movies that were actually found in garage sales, Blockbuster liquidation sales or some dusty thrift store that still has a VHS section. Thanks to the efforts…
As awards season draws nearer and best-of-the-year lists keep rolling in, there’s only one thing left to do: Get excited about what comes next. Here are 10 films you won’t want to miss in 2014. 1. Adieu au language (Dir. Jean-Luc Godard) Jean-Luc Godard, former master of the French nouvelle…
Rosemary’s Baby notwithstanding, it’s usually only white suburban people who fall prey to movie ghosts and demons — they’re always the ones opening doors to rooms that shouldn’t be entered, stepping witlessly into pentagrams painted on the floor in goat’s blood, and wondering aloud, “You think this is some sort…
Toby Halbrooks is on a roll. The local film producer and director is an integral part of the film community quietly earning Dallas a reputation. For the second year in a row, Halbrooks will return to Sundance Film Festival in 2014 with two projects. Last year he co-produced Shane Carruth’s…
In the 20 years since Reality Bites, his directorial debut, Ben Stiller has metastasized from sketch comedy lunatic to Generation X darling to blockbuster king. Among the funny men, most of whom have calcified into cliques (yawn, Anchorman 2), he’s the last of the triple-threat writer-director-stars, and the only one…
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…
What becomes a legend most? After prolonged incubation, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom offers the biopic’s usual reply: legend itself. Bigger, louder, more expensive legend, brought to bear by the best talents and technologies of the day. The name Nelson Mandela has long been shorthand for the things Mandela shows…
Solemn as a funeral march, humorless as your junior high principal, as Japanese as a grocery-store California roll, Keanu Reeves’ let’s-mope-about-and-kill-ourselves samurai drama has exactly three things going for it. First, the cockeyed sensuality of Rinko Kikuchi as a spider-puking evil witch who can transform herself into a fox, a…
The surprise in Grudge Match, the not-quite-a-comedy that pits Rocky Balboa against Raging Bull, isn’t that it has the chutzpah to posit a universe in which Sylvester Stallone and Robert DeNiro have, since the early ’80s, been equally matched rivals. The surprise is in how easily audiences will buy it…
For professional film critics, you’ll notice, the year in film tends to conclude prematurely. Those “Best Of” lists you see popping up everywhere around now have often been tallied, decided, and finalized by mid-November — and in the web’s ever-harried race for clicks and pageviews, that date seems to be…
All photos courtesy of Sony PicturesStory by Vanessa Martin American Hustle, directed and co-written by David O. Russell, is undeniably the must-watch film this holiday season. With outstanding performances by an A-list cast (Amy Adams, Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, and Jennifer Lawrence), the period film is loosely based on the…
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…
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 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…
How stubborn was Walt Disney? He spent 26 years wheedling Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers to sell him the film rights to her book — call it determination or bullying. Travers thought he was a hack who would louse up her story with cartoon penguins. Walt thought she was a…
Someday there will be a serious academic study on Tyler Perry, the battered and sexually abused child who legally changed his first name at 16 to distance himself from his estranged father and grew rich playing a caricature of his mother in pantyhose and a dress, like a sass-talking Norman…
The all-star film version of Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play August: Osage County opens here January 10 (postponed from December 25, which means we have to suffer our own horrible relatives all Christmas day instead of escaping to spend time with Letts’ fictional ones). Meryl Streep tops the cast list…
