Look, if it’s going to have any chance of stirring in us that warm, giddy, life-saving thrill of love actually working out, a romantic comedy with a happy ending probably has to cheat a little bit, to inflate its obstacles, to make those final moments truly momentous. To honor that…
Richard Linklater ended his feel-good Best Picture contender Boyhood on a high. His star, 18-year-old would-be artist Mason, graduated high school and was ready to conquer the world. But what if Linklater had kept filming? And what if Mason wasn’t an actor, but a real teenage boy? Meet Samuel Klemke…
Most of us can’t imagine having a disease that tugs and tears at the very threads of who we are. When we wake up in the middle of the night with outlandish fears, we strike reassuring bargains with ourselves: If I lose my sight, I’ll still have music. If I…
The world needs fewer tasteful movies about distasteful things. It definitely doesn’t need J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year, in which Oscar Isaac plays a nouveau-riche heating-oil baron in early-1980s New York, striving to maintain his principles amid industry corruption and generally scummy behavior. Isaac’s Abel Morales skulks through most…
Each year, screenwriters kill off enough off-screen children to fill a Chuck E. Cheese’s. A dead son or daughter gives a movie the illusion of depth plus an easy explanation for whatever the script ladles on the surviving parents. Binge-drinking? Nymphomania? Sudden bouts of breakdancing? Blame the wee coffin. In…
The most pleasurably ludicrous highlight of The Boy Next Door comes half an hour in, before the sex and murders and something’s-in-the-mirror-behind-her! jolts that stud the film like Flavor Crystals. The high school English teacher played by Jennifer Lopez is dazzled by a gift from the handsome student (Ryan Guzman)…
In the opening moments of Two Days, One Night, a working-class Belgian woman named Sandra (Marion Cotillard) wakes from a midday nap, takes a phone call, removes a tart from the oven, pops a pill, and begs herself not to cry. With a sense of having arrived in the middle…
There’s something bracingly honest about The Humbling, Barry Levinson’s movie about a 67-year-old Shakespearean actor, played by Al Pacino, who, after being struck with crippling anxiety, gets his mojo restored — some of it, anyway — by a manipulative muse (Greta Gerwig). Based on the 2009 Philip Roth novel of…
Mortdecai is creeping into theaters with the flushed shame of a debutante who expects to be pelted with tomatoes. It’s a pity. In 1965, Mortdecai would be the hit of the year. Director David Koepp whips through this pop-colored caper about crooked art dealer Charlie Mortdecai (Johnny Depp) — one…
BY INKOO KANG The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore’s great misfortune isn’t that it replaces The Colbert Report, but that it premieres after Last Week Tonight With John Oliver. The Colbert Report was sui generis, and will likely remain so, because such a series makes leviathan demands on its host:…
The bi-coastal film pod continues in 2015! In New York, Village Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl, along with Voice film critic Stephanie Zacharek, connect via the magic of the Internet with LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson to discuss the nominations for this year’s Academy Awards, announced on January 15…
Twitter is double-stuffed with check-your-privilege messages for entitled men, but I’ve rarely seen one as potent as this singular line from Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s out-of-time masterwork Winter Sleep, a Chekhovian drama of marriage and class and the way both can inspire insulated cluelessness. “Just once, I’d like you to defend…
Anyone who loves Michael Mann movies, or even just the idea of Michael Mann movies, accepts that film style is a language and something more, a way of thinking, feeling and looking that goes beyond basic plotting, dialogue, or character motivation. I can tell you pretty much everything that happens…
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…
