Podcast: How We Will Remember Robin Williams

On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of The Village Voice and Amy Nicholson of L.A. Weekly remember Robin Williams, who died on Monday. He was 63. They also recommend We Are Mari Pepa, a slight movie about growing up punk in Mexico, the Daniel…

In Calvary, Brendan Gleeson Shines as an Irish Priest in Crisis

In Calvary, Brendan Gleeson plays a Catholic priest who plods through a rustic Irish village that’s more brutal than beautiful. The beach is gray, the waves are choppy, and the wind whips his ankle-length black cassock as though every step were a fight against nature. In some ways, it is…

The Expendables 3 Refuses to Be Expendable or Especially Interesting

Titles don’t get more ironic than The Expendables 3. The franchise claims to be about death-seeking mercenaries yet stars ’80s action heroes, who refuse to die. Three films in, everyone in the sprawling team is still alive and ass kicking, save for Bruce Willis, whose million-dollar-a-day asking salary has caused…

The Giver Teaches What Humanity Has Forgotten

The Giver is more simple and raw than the rest of today’s teen dystopias that try to cram in unnecessary backstory and love triangles. (Original author Lois Lowry published her novel in 1993, which makes it officially the cool aunt of Katniss and the kids.) The story picks up several…

Don’t Miss Jafar Panahi’s Courageous Closed Curtain

Sometimes, if not often enough, movies demand to be watched as something more than just expensive daydreams — they come festooned with real-world urgency and relevance, and the context of their existence kicks the shit out of how entertained we may or may not be at any given moment. No…

Culinary Mash-Up The Hundred-Foot Journey Is Tasty Enough

Lasse Hallström has become an expert at making mom-jeans movies, nonthreatening pictures in which headstrong women find love just when they think it’s too late (Once Around), take the upper hand with their cheating husbands (Something to Talk About), and turn small, French villages topsy-turvy by opening chocolate shops (Chocolat)…

Land Ho!‘s Horny Seniors Never Quite Charm

Land Ho! is a How Grandpa Got His Groove Back for the geezer set, a buddy road trip through Iceland starring two divorced men with a combined age of 150 years. The writer-directors, Martha Stephens and Aaron Katz, are 30 and 34, young enough to be their leading men’s grandchildren…

Film Critics Need to Learn to Look — and Enjoy

Star presence, that distillation of charisma and sometimes glamour, lies at the heart of the movies’ appeal. The star presence James Harvey evokes so richly in his new book, Watching Them Be, is never simply about physical beauty. Harvey rightly points out that Ingrid Bergman’s fresh unaffectedness was distinctly unglamorous,…

Into the Storm Attempts to Find the Fun in Destroying American Towns

Incompatible fronts collide in director Steven Quale’s weather-horror patience-tester Into the Storm. The first is the summertime yen for righteous kablooey, the dumber the better, exemplified here by drunk galoots hauling ass into a twister on a four-wheeler ATV, tossing beer cans and whooping about getting a “million YouTube hits.”…

Miami’s Oscar Isaac Cast in New HBO Miniseries

Oscar Isaac is a very busy man. The Guatemalan-Cuban heartthrob is not only currently filming the latest Star Wars installment, he also has two films slated to be released later this year. One is a thriller with Jessica Chastain, A Most Violent Year, and the other is also a thriller,…