Jake Gyllenhaal, not a particularly bulky guy to begin with, dropped 20 pounds or so to play a Los Angeles misfit who finds his calling as a freelance crime videographer in Dan Gilroy’s nervy thriller Nightcrawler. Even when Robert De Niro does it, weight change isn’t acting — it’s the…
First-Rate Force Majeure Exposes the Act of Manliness
Ruben Östlund makes films the way sociologists devise thought experiments: by posing a hypothesis and thinking fully through its consequences. The Swedish director’s previous feature, 2011’s Play, follows a group of black teenagers in Gothenburg as they blithely coerce a trio of affluent white children to hand over their valuables…
This essay contains a spoiler or two for John Wick. There’s too much violence in movies today — too much of the wrong kind, though if you asked me what the “right” kind is, I would only be able to tell you that I know it when I see it…
When we first meet the title character in Olive Kitteridge, she considers the revolver in her hands and looks up at the cloudless sky above the woods one last time. The 25-year journey (and the accumulation of mistakes and bad luck therein) that leads the elderly Olive to that moment…
Alexandre Aja’s Horns is the rare YA-ish romance that doesn’t make like a guidance counselor and force the characters to shake hands and forgive. It’s a biblically tinged, eye-for-an-eye vengeance thriller about an emo boyfriend named Ig (Daniel Radcliffe) whose childhood sweetheart Merrin (Juno Temple) has been murdered underneath the…
Keanu Reeves in John WickOn this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, we welcome Village Voice contributor and filmmaker Zachary Wigon, who tells us about his paranoid thriller The Heart Machine (iTunes)…
The Alamo Drafthouse is about to launch a massive invasion on the Dallas-Fort Worth area, opening several new theaters, and it starts downtown with a new movie house on South Lamar Street. Developers for the new theater announced plans to break ground on the construction next month but a gathering…
Among its many attributes, Justin Simien’s exuberant debut feature, Dear White People, proves that we’re not yet living in a “post-racial America.” Forget for a moment that there are so many vexing problems entwining race, class and economics that we haven’t been able to put a Band-Aid on, let alone…
Before there was a Birdman, there was a Batman — several, in fact, though the best was played by Michael Keaton in the two Tim Burton films in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Since then, Christian Bale’s somber strutting and muttering, as seen in Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies, has…
Mathieu Amalric’s brisk, agreeably nasty thriller The Blue Room turns on a couple murders — or does it? — but rather than corpses, it’s time and space and human connection that get most memorably diced. Working from Georges Simenon’s ’64 novel of a wrong man accused — or is he…
Jazz isn’t dead. Miraculously, there’s always a small but steady stream of young people who continue to fall in love with this most dazzling and elusive American genre, spending hours, days and months running ribbons of scales and memorizing Charlie Parker solos in the hopes that some of the alto…
You can’t live in New York for more than 10 days without meeting some truly dreadful people: couples who fret about having to choose between buying a summer home and having a second child, even as you’re struggling to pay your monthly rent; large groups of people getting together for…
Jake Gyllenhaal is used to exhaustion. During his research for the LAPD dramaEnd of Watch, he spent five months patrolling the streets with real-life police officers until 7 a.m. It was good preparation for his new movie Nightcrawler, a blistering portrait of a morally corrupt crime-scene videographer who works the…
It’s awards season and the hyped movies are starting to land in theaters. On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, we talk about Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, starring Michael Keaton, and Alex Ross Perry’s Listen Up Philip, and carve out some time to recommend Nothing Bad Can Happen and Glen…
A gloom hangs over writer-director David Ayer’s brutal war drama Fury that only the audience can see. It’s April 1945, and we know that in weeks the Nazis will surrender. The war is already over — Hitler just hasn’t admitted it. American Sergeant Don “Wardaddy” Collier (Brad Pitt) suspects as…
The big news: In its first half, before it bottoms out with the rankest feel-goodery, Theodore Melfi’s too-familiar ain’t-he-irascible comedy-drama St. Vincent features scene after scene of Bill Murray actually trying to make you laugh. How long has it been? He plays Vincent, a drunk-driving Brooklynite whose look suggests science…
Knocking out the first-rate forgeries that fooled 60 American museums? That was a curiously mundane miracle, something for Mark Landis to do while watching TV. A frail and ascetic Mississippian who resembles Michael Stipe playing Truman Capote, Landis sketched and painted minor Currans, Averys and Cassatts with one eye on…
With the news that Paul Feig is going to reboot Ghostbusters with an all-female cast, we wonder on this week’s Voice Film Club podcast what it would be like if they re-did another ’80s classic: Young Guns. We then move onto the latest Brad Pitt World War II movie, Fury,…
Vinnie Potestivo of Vinnie Potestivo Entertainment is looking to make a Laguna Beach-type show — but in our very own Highland Park. If you don’t remember MTV’s Laguna Beach because you had better things to do than watch spoiled California kids get drunk, then you missed out on MTV’s prime…
It started with a stink. After one of Ben Kusin’s usual smoke breaks and before an important work meeting, he stopped by a gas station for something to freshen up his clothes. “He had a conversation with the clerk and he suggested Purell and breath mints, but he was worried…
Every year, there should be at least one movie that lights up your senses like fireworks. You should feel anticipation buzzing at the base of your heels. Hollywood owes us this–at least one time a year. This year, one of the most anticipated films buzzing up from the feet up…
God save us from old coots and the actors who play them. Actors, like the rest of us, grow old, and there aren’t a whole lot of good roles available to them. But do we really need to see Robert Duvall playing a withered grouch for the millionth time? There’s…
