Following the recent resignation of longtime leader Robert Rosenberg, Coral Gables Art Cinema has selected Nat Chediak as its new program director. A source says an oral agreement between Chediak and cinema founder and former executive director, Steven Krams, will be confirmed at a meeting on Tuesday, October 14. Co-founder…
The Dracula Begins-style sword-and-fangs curio Dracula Untold plays like someone said, “What if we took a vampire flick but did a find-and-replace swapping out all of that bare-neck sensuality for some videogame ass-kicking?” Or: “Remember what the Star Wars prequels did for Darth Vader? Let’s foist the same kind of…
It says something about current global affairs that a movie set during the UK miners’ strike of the mid-1980s — an event that tore lives to shreds, representing a dismal and damaging period in late-20th-century British history — is likely to make you feel better rather than worse about the…
The best that can be said of The Pact 2 is that its existence might draw the attention of more viewers to The Pact, a superior indie creep-out from 2012 whose creator, the writer-director Nicholas McCarthy, fashioned it according to three inviolable principles. One: Get the heroine (Caity Lotz) into…
It was a mystery that reporter Gary Webb would have jumped on: a man who’d made powerful enemies allegedly committing suicide with two gunshots to the head. The tragedy is that Webb was the deceased. Michael Cuesta’s earnest, ire-inducing Kill the Messenger is a David-and-Goliath story where truth is the…
God save us from old coots and the actors who play them. Is that a terrible thing to say? 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…
Groupie has come to be an ugly word, a misogynist dig that’s used all too casually by men and women alike. A groupie is a woman who doesn’t “do” anything; she gets all of her glamour via her association with a strong man, most often a rock star. How can…
Four years ago, comedian Bill Hader told his agent he wanted to do a drama. It took a while. “I used to think typecasting wasn’t a thing, and it totally is,” Hader admits. “That’s an industry feeling: ‘How can I take that person seriously when I know they’re capable of…
“I’ll always be anti-authoritarian, as long as I live,” says Terry Gilliam, the comic provocateur who’s been taking aim at the establishment for over four decades. The only thing that changes: his targets. In Life of Brian, it was religion. In Brazil, the government. And in his latest film, The…
Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice, along with LA Weekly’s Amy Nicholson, open this week’s podcast with a brief discussion of Twin Peaks, which comes back to TV via a series on Showtime in 2016, and move onto The Judge, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Robert Duvall,…
Last night, Oxygen network brought some new life to our fingertips with the premiere of Nail’d It. Yup, you guessed it, a reality show competition that has nail artists across the country competing for a grand prize of $100,000 and to be on the cover of Nail It! magazine. If…
Last time I wrote about the way Hispanic actors and actresses are shoved into stereotyped roles, people got frustrated. But guess what? A lot of people are just as frustrated by the fact that a beautiful Welsh actress just got handed a role that should have certainly gone to someone…
There are few things more terrifying than a scary story that’s based on some truth. Sure, when it comes to movie adaptations, Hollywood will exaggerate the gory details here and there, but the underlying foundation is real. Such was the case with last year’s The Conjuring, based on the lives…
Annabelle, an effective prequel to horror pastiche The Conjuring, surpasses its predecessor simply by virtue of occasionally being scary. Both films are over-reliant on deafening sound effects and side-eye glimpses of underwhelming ghosts. But Annabelle’s scare scenes are better paced and more thoughtfully lensed. Its hokey, funhouse-worthy spooks — a…
Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice, along with LA Weekly’s Amy Nicholson, talk about one of the big movies of the year, Gone Girl, which opens in about 3,000 U.S. theaters on Friday, but the trio also makes room for lesser-known films like The Blue Room, Men,…
What makes a timeless classic? It’s got to be honest, it’s got to be made with passion, and it has to bring something to the table that’s never been done. It’s a daunting task, and sometimes, it’s better done when you’re not really trying. Nas was able to do it…
Everything about Gone Girl, David Fincher’s adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s enormously popular 2012 thriller about a deteriorating marriage and a wife gone missing, is precise and thoughtful — it’s as well planned as the perfect murder, with its share of vicious, shivery delights. But at the end of the perfect…
There are few things more terrifying than a scary story that’s based on some truth. Sure, when it comes to movie adaptations, Hollywood will exaggerate the gory details here and there, but the underlying foundation is real. Such was the case with last year’s The Conjuring, based on the lives…
One rhyme in particular crystallizes the genius of Nas’s 1994 classic Illmatic. It comes in the song “One Love,” which takes the form of a letter to a friend in prison: “Congratulations, you know you got a son,” Nas raps. “I heard he looks like ya, why don’t your lady…
Every child who’s thrown a tantrum, packed a bag and plotted to run away has shivered with the same vengeful thought: I wish I could see how sad they’ll be when I’m gone. The Left Behind franchise implies that evangelicals haven’t grown up. This new film version, the latest in…
There’s a good chance that filmmaker Signe Baumane isn’t on your radar yet, but with her first feature film, Rocks in My Pockets, being declared Latvia’s submission for the Academy Awards this year, she should be. It’s not just because of her Oscar submission that folks should be looking out…
Public sex on theme park rides, fiercely independent Latinas, brawls between really high teens, and a dash of incest: These are the childlike joys of Happyland, the new MTV dramedy chronicling the day-drunk, partner-swapping, clear-skinned, young employees of a Disney-ish park. The show, which debuts today at 11 p.m., is…
