“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…
Although it’s based on the true story of the illegitimate daughter of a Royal Navy captain and an enslaved African woman, Amma Asante’s Belle’s richest inspiration comes from a painting. A 1779 double portrait hanging at Scone Palace in Scotland, it shows a pretty blonde teenager decked out in typical…
Tom Hiddleston can pull off extreme looks. In The Avengers, he strutted around in Loki’s 2-foot horned helmet. For Midnight in Paris, he finessed F. Scott Fitzgerald’s prim finger waves. And in his latest, Jim Jarmusch’s vampire romance Only Lovers Left Alive, Hiddleston lounges bare-chested in velvet-cuffed robes. The only…
Harrison Ford has been a good soldier in the Star Wars. He did whatever was asked of him by his commanding officer, George Lucas, even when his commanding officer was wrong. Now that Ford is back in Star Wars, and J.J. Abrams is running the show, Abrams’ first order of…
On this week’s Voice Film club podcast, L.A. Weekly chief film critic Amy Nicholson, Village Voice film critic Stephanie Zacharek and Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl discuss two movies opening this weekend, including the James Franco’d Palo Alto, which we fully recommend, and the latest version of the West Memphis…
By Danny King By the time Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s 2008 The Dark Knight was finally seen by critics and audiences, talk of a posthumous Oscar reached a fever pitch. Naturally, the inclination to compare Ledger’s work to past posthumous landmarks proved tempting, and many…
It’s been a couple of years since the city of Dallas has had their tolerance tested for excessive violence and suffering presented as entertainment. We don’t mean within the hustle and bustle that is life in the Metroplex. Thanks to a population that’s heavily armed, traditional cuisine that’s deliciously fattening…
How much can you take away and still have a movie? Steven Knight’s Locke is an experiment in reducing contemporary screen storytelling to its irreducible essentials, which isn’t quite the same thing as being an “experimental” film, despite the early reviews from England. It shows us just one actor, on…
Today it’s hard for us to fathom why preachers used to rail so vehemently against jitterbugging. Even with cultural context — black music infiltrating white America; the revolution of rhythm over melody — the athletic whirligig swing-time boogie craze of the ’30s and ’40s now looks as wholesome as ice-cream…
If you’re in a horror movie and you’re the baby-sitter, don’t answer the phone. Don’t hide in the closet. If you find an ouija board, don’t play with it. Never say, “I’ll be right back.” If you’re a woman, don’t take a shower. In fact, keep your clothes on at…
The vampires who walk among us — and they do — are not the Twilight kind, or the True Blood kind, or even the Buffy kind. In the world of Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, the director’s most emotionally direct film since Dead Man, and maybe his finest, period,…
Since 2002, the year Sam Raimi’s SpiderMan hit theaters, the other SpiderMan, the hero of the actual comic books, has joined the Avengers, revealed his secret identity to the world, and become a highly paid inventor who has engineered, among other marvels, a limitless energy source science has dubbed “Parker…
The sexual politics of Nick Cassavetes’s decidedly un-romantic comedy The Other Woman are intriguingly European and, at their core, kind of groovy. Wronged Connecticut wifey-wife Kate (Leslie Mann) seeks out her husband’s mistress, sexy city-slicker and high-powered lawyer Carly (Cameron Diaz), looking to her for answers: Why is my husband…
