Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street is the kind of movie directors make when they wield money, power, and a not inconsiderable degree of arrogance. Sprawling and extravagant, it revels in all manner of excess, including sexual debauchery, hearty abuse of liquor and quaaludes, even dwarf-tossing. Its antihero, the…
The surprise in Grudge Match, the not-quite-a-comedy that pits Rocky Balboa against Raging Bull, isn’t that it has the chutzpah to posit a universe in which Sylvester Stallone and Robert De Niro have, since the early ’80s, been equally matched rivals. The surprise is in how easily audiences will buy…
Solemn as a funeral march, humorless as your junior high principal, as Japanese as a grocery-store California roll, Keanu Reeves’s let’s-mope-about-and-kill-ourselves samurai drama has exactly three things going for it. First, the cockeyed sensuality of Rinko Kikuchi as a spider-puking evil witch who can transform herself into a fox, a…
Before you run out to see one of the several movies opening on this Christmas Day 2013, listen to this very special Voice Film Club podcast: Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl runs point while Voice film critic Stephanie Zacharek and L.A. Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson run down their top…
As awards season draws nearer and best-of-the-year lists keep rolling in, there’s only one thing left to do: get excited about what comes next. Here’s ten films you won’t want to miss in 2014…
There’s camp, and then there’s camp: pop culture so awesomely awful that it ends up being just, well, awesome. Many of Elvis Presley’s flicks fall into the aforementioned category (ok, all), but the campiest by far is Clambake, a 1967 Miami beach movie encompassing erudite themes like the science of…
Three types of artists hinge on authenticity: punk bands, folk singers, and rappers. Actors, like Oscar Isaac, are by definition phonies. But the star of the Joel and Ethan Coen’s new film, Inside Llewyn Davis, gets that pressure to keep it real. In high school, he was a straight-edge punk…
Spanish director Antonia San Juan does not hold back her criticism of the oppressive, suffocating extended family. Not in her new film, The Summer Side (Del Otro Lado Del Verano), which screens at O Cinema Miami Shores tonight, nor in real life. The film, San Juan’s second feature, follows an…
American Hustle, directed and co-written by David O. Russell, is undeniably the must-watch film this holiday season. With outstanding performances by an A-list cast (Amy Adams, Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, and Jennifer Lawrence), the period film is loosely based on the real-life Abscam FBI Sting during the late-1970s. It’s a…
Joaquin Phoenix in Her.On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, this paper’s film critics talk about Spike Jonze’s Her and Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, in addition to the wave of films all coming out before the year’s over. Listen to it on iTunes or below on Soundcloud:…
Folk music is supposed to be the music of the people. Yet at the heart of Joel and Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis, set in New York in the winter of 1961, is a folksinger with no feeling for people. Llewyn Davis, played by Oscar Isaac, is a broke, rumpled…
Three types of artists hinge on authenticity: punk bands, folk singers, and rappers. Actors, like Oscar Isaac, are by definition phonies. But the star of the Joel and Ethan Coen’s new film, Inside Llewyn Davis, gets that pressure to keep it real. In high school, he was a straight-edge punk…
How stubborn was Walt Disney? He spent 26 years wheedling Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers to sell him the film rights to her book — call it determination or bullying. Travers thought he was a hack who would louse up her story with cartoon penguins. Walt thought she was a…
The best movies about con artists work a bit of flimflammery themselves. They’re not necessarily dishonest; they just can’t resist making the truth shinier than it is in real life. There may not be much behind the sparkling tinsel curtain of David O. Russell’s extraordinarily entertaining American Hustle. But what…
The audience that shows up for a comedy is the most tyrannical of all. Its very presence is the equivalent of a schoolyard bully’s challenge: “Go ahead — make me laugh.” Which is why there’s danger in following up a hit comedy with a sequel, even nine years after the…
The age of the riot grrrls entered like a screaming woman and exited like a cooing teen. The woman was Kathleen Hanna, the Bikini Kill frontwoman who kicked boys out of her mosh pits and insisted, “I’m not going to sit around and be peace and love with somebody’s boot…
As awards season draws nearer and best-of-the-year lists keep rolling in, there’s only one thing left to do: get excited about what comes next. Here are 10 films you won’t want to miss in 2014. 1. Adieu au Language (Directed by Jean-Luc Godard) Jean-Luc Godard, master of the French Nouvelle…
I could write a Shakespearean sonnet about each film on my Top 10 of 2013, but we know we’re all here for the agreements and arguments. (Plus, have you tried writing about Joe Swanberg in iambic pentameter?) Ladies and gentlemen, let’s begin. The Act of Killing — The year’s best…
If you’re a person alive in this age, Ralph Fiennes has at some point probably made you hate him. As the Nazi Amon Goeth in 1993’s Schindler’s List, Fiennes embodied one of history’s great evils, somehow making being utterly detestable compelling. In Martin McDonagh’s riotous, under-regarded In Bruges, Fiennes spat…
Here’s where I write about how hard it is to draw up a 10-best list at the end of the year. Except it isn’t: I think of drawing up a list as an honor and a necessity, a way of putting 12 months of moviegoing into some sort of perspective…
In Spike Jonze’s new sci-fi romance, Her, Joaquin Phoenix plays a divorcé who rebounds by falling in love with his smartphone. On a recent Wednesday, however, he’s a delinquent boyfriend, leaving his iPad abandoned on a chair in a Lebanese restaurant as he bounces off to the parking lot for…
The year 2013 hasn’t been the proudest for Florida, especially when it comes to issues of race. This is the year of George Zimmerman’s innocence. It’s the year Taylor Chapman harrassed a Dunkin Donuts employee using the n-word. It’s the year one Miami Dolphins player made headlines by using racist…
