If the Saw series taught us anything, it’s that every quasi-inventive genre movie is fated to become a yearly franchise with increasingly diminishing returns. The Purge practically cried out for this treatment from its premise alone: James DeMonaco’s film had a big idea — a near-future in which “any and…
A defiantly R-rated farce seemingly commissioned to plug the We’re the Millers-shaped hole in the summer lineup, Sex Tape is warmer and more amusing than its ads would lead one to believe. In fact, it’s almost good enough, leaning a little too hard on the innate likability of stars Cameron…
On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, we hear from L.A. Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson, who’s intrigued by the bizarre universe of Pixar’s Planes movies. We also hear about the film critic’s background and how she became interested in the movies by way of subliminal advertising and photography…
On this week’s Voice Film Club episode, film critics Alan Scherstuhl, Amy Nicholson and Stephanie Zacharek recommend seeing Matt Reeves’ Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (12:00) and Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (20:00), a movie filmed over twelve years with the same cast…
Who knows why, but the sight of apes sitting tall and proud on horseback is stirring in a primal way. That’s one of the best images in Matt Reeves’ Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the sequel to the enormously successful 2011 Rise of the Planet of the Apes…
Plays adapted into movies always feel naked by the time they make it to the screen, their theatrical bones showing through in a most awkward and unbecoming way. That’s more or less true of Roman Polanski’s screen version of David Ives’ Venus in Fur, in which a playwright and first-time…
In contemporary genre-splash Indiewood, the task is often simple but bedeviling: You have an HD camera and a modest house in the L.A. hills; now what do you do? Shane Carruth, among others, has proven that you don’t need much more — just add ideas. Call it Home-Based Sci-Fi, from…
A major achievement in sunny wretchedness, Álex de la Iglesia’s splatter-comedy Witching & Bitching projectile pukes its outrages at you with a gusto recalling the early days of those (sadly) reformed upchuckers Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson. De la Iglesia doesn’t share those directors’ interest in making clear just why…
How has there not already been a Nicolas Cage movie called Rage? That title could fit many of the Drive Angry star’s late-career time-wasters. Here it works best as an imperative rather than an announcement of theme: You may feel some anger if you pay to watch this. Or you…
“It’s the secret films you have to watch out for,” jokes Richard Linklater of his new movie Boyhood, a furtive experiment that he kept quiet for more than a decade. In 2002, he chose a first-grader named Eller Coltrane, the 6-year-old son of two Texas artists; cast Patricia Arquette and…
“I forget that people think that I’m the girl with a ponytail and a briefcase,” says Anna Kendrick, perched on a couch in a T-shirt and jeans. Her career-launching role as a prim go-getter in Up in the Air is so far removed from her actual self that she’s still…
Sirens blare and an eerie voice announces that it’s best to remain indoors if you don’t plan to participate. While others make safety arrangements, and some sharpen their knives, one man loads his black, steel-armored car with plenty of guns and begins cruising. Fires erupt along the street, and gunshots…
On this week’s Voice Film Club episode, film critics Alan Scherstuhl, Amy Nicholson and Stephanie Zacharek race through the latest (and the most terrible) Transformers movie (2:01), Earth to Echo (13:14), and Tammy (16:30)…
If a toddler tried to re-create the mystifying behavior of adults, it would look a lot like Paul Haggis’ Third Person, a drama in which grown-ups scream and cry and kiss for reasons that are confounding even to those who understand speech. The film follows a handful of couples, or…
Earth to Echo is a slender kiddie flick about a quartet of preteens and their palm-sized alien pal that’s at once bland, well-intentioned and utterly terrifying about the mental development of modern children. As in the most honest kids films, our 5-foot heroes admit to being isolated, unhappy and cowed…
It’s kind of happy-sad, like watching a kid you knew as a toddler graduate from high school: Chris Evans, seemingly destined to be a boy forever, is now officially a grown-up. In Bong Joon-ho’s futuristic snowbummer Snowpiercer, the Korean director’s first English-language film, Evans plays the leader of a group…
To call Roger Ebert one of the great populist film critics is to damn him with faint praise. Though he took pride in working for the scrappier of the two Chicago dailies, the Sun-Times, and though we do have him to thank — or curse —f or popularizing the thumbs-up/thumbs-down…
It’s a relief, after the wretched Identity Thief, to see movies whose makers love Melissa McCarthy as much as audiences do. Identity Thief’s comic centerpiece was predicated on the idea that McCarthy having sex is a hilarious gross-out, like she’s the pie Jason Biggs once had to diddle. Half an…
Horror, like porno, can be judged only by its effect on your pulse. If you jerked in your seat, it served its function. Biology requires us to react to jump scares, just it urges a lonely man to thrill to a great set of tits. But triggering a coronary reaction…
Mark Ruffalo’s great gift, besides those scruffy good looks and that prickish, hungover charisma, is capturing the essence of the guy who’s spinning toward a crash but trying to angle himself back. His greatest performance, in Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me, one of the best films of the…
Here are some of the triumphant moments of recent history that make it into the climactic montage in America, the latest “America’s perfect!”/”America’s doomed!” pant load from felonious troll Dinesh D’Souza: Jackie Robinson rounding home. Elvis Presley swinging his hips. Ronald Reagan and the Berlin Wall. Boxed copies of Windows…
Horror movies are so not-horrifying because generally the idiots who get speared in the skull or chainsawed by a masked loon generally don’t have the wits to survive a weekend getaway. If you sent these dolts to a lavish weekend at the Mirabeau Inn in Skaneateles, New York, they would…
