Violette is a film consumed by hunger, as was its heroine, the French writer Violette Leduc: hunger for love, for companionship, for artistic validation. Portrayed with flickering levels of ferocity by the supple-faced Emmanuelle Devos, Leduc forcefully grasps at potential paramours and sucks down cigarettes with the intensity of a…
A truly punk act, a shout of freedom, frustration, and exaltation, hits about halfway through Lukas Moodysson’s girl-punk reverie We Are the Best! The three 13-year-old protagonists, high on the idea of the three-chord band they’ve just started, find some damp garbage bags on the street that, they discover, are…
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…
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…
If a toddler tried to re-create the mystifying behavior of adults, it would look a lot like Paul Haggis’s Third Person, a drama where 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 really,…
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…
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…
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…
“I snuck into Churchill’s at 17. It was 1991 and I went to go see a band called Young Turk that had just gotten signed to Geffen Records and was about to go on tour. They were from Hialeah. I remember being scared out of my mind from the car…
Believe it or not, during Transformers: Age of Extinction, Michael Bay’s fourth rattling of the toy box, I felt one moment of near transcendence. Three-fourths of the way through the punishing 165-minute runtime—and fifteen minutes after my seatmate took off her 3-D glasses in exhaustion—my brain left my body, crying…
Fans of Kevin Hart and Ice Cube, get excited. A new film with both of your favorites is coming up soon. Ride Along, which released early in the year to critical dismissal but some solid audience praise, is getting a sequel. And best of all for folks excited for this…
In a movie industry shamefully dominated by men, it’s tough to find films made by women, primarily for women. Sure, some men make films for women, but it’s tiresome to never see female directors or screenwriters working on cool, well-advertised projects – especially projects outside the genres of romance and…
The laws of supply and demand apply equally to real estate and reality television. In a marketplace saturated with options — Kardashians, Real Housewives of Anyplace, etc. — the value of each individual property is diminished. So how can Million Dollar Listing Miami, Bravo’s spin-off of its similar series in…
For all of the Fox News fear-mongering that Hollywood is out to indoctrinate us with liberal values, when it comes to pregnancy, the movies have for years been curiously conservative. If a woman gets knocked up, she either loses the baby by accident (cue waterworks) or carries it to term…
In January 2013, an incandescently brilliant American political activist and computer programmer named Aaron Swartz was hounded to suicide by the overzealous U.S. attorney for Massachusetts, Carmen Ortiz. Anyone who argues differently has a desk drawer full of government pay stubs. Brian Knappenberger’s The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of…
Romances are Hollywood’s most anxiety-inducing fantasy. Like superhero flicks or horror films, they exist in a phony world of big scenes and breathtaking climaxes. But while audiences know that geeks can’t meld with spiders and that the bogeyman isn’t real, they still hope to fall in love, and boy, it’d…
Comedies about the battle of the sexes tend to have one clear loser: the audience. Driven by an oppositional view of romance that proved outmoded and seldom funny, Think Like a Man introduced us to six men living in Los Angeles and their corresponding flames. Some of these entanglements were…
David Trueba’s wistfully charming six-time Goya Award-winning (including best film, director, and original screenplay) Living Is Easy with Eyes Closed circles a blip in Beatles history when a tour-weary John Lennon took a break from the band in 1966 and visited Almería, Spain, to film a role in Richard Lester’s…
On this week’s episode of the Voice Film Club podcast, Voice film critics Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek, along with L.A. Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson, discuss rom-com Begin Again (2:26), starring the always-interesting Mark Ruffalo. They also talk about the biting rom-com parody They Came Together (15:47), which might…
Reality TV cast members tend to have — how to put this nicely? — outgoing personalities. But it takes a special kind of exhibitionist to bare your ass on national television. Bonus points for doing so in the first five minutes of your new TV series’ first episode. Chris Leavitt…
There’s so much to see and explore at Diagon Alley, Universal Studios’ latest Harry Potter-themed expansion, that words and pictures can’t possibly do it any justice. But moving pictures? Now we’re talking. See also: 21 Things to Look Out for in Diagon Alley, Universal Orlando’s New Harry Potter Experience…
