After twelve years on the air, The Daily Show With Jon Stewart became required viewing during the Dubya years, when much of the nation was desperate to look to almost anyone else for political leadership. The Comedy Central series offered nightly catharsis in five- or eight-minute bursts, voicing the anger…
The upcoming Amy Winehouse documentary Amy is one of the best music docs Village Voice film critic Stephanie Zacharek has ever seen, and she explains why to Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl and LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson this week. Also this week: The confusing (yet really, really enjoyable)…
Too often, Hollywood film reduces love to romanticized lust between people. Yet, in truth, Love can be a slippery thing, as it comes from within a single person, transmuted by perception of the other, which can in turn, influence the feelings of the source. Time and environment has an effect,…
Crystal Moselle’s documentary The Wolfpack is a Manhattan fable about fear. Two decades ago, a Hare Krishna conspiracy theorist and self-described god named Oscar Angulo moved from Peru to a public housing tenement on the Lower East Side with his American bride, Susanne, whom he’d met and wooed on the Inca Trail.
Steven Soderbergh’s 2012 Magic Mike was a cocktease. The ads tempted audiences with sweaty chests and thrusting crotches, but after Soderbergh lured us in to his all-male strip club, he turned on the lights to show us the squalor. His hunks were drugged and morally decayed.
Five films into the franchise, Terminator: Genisys feels like a VHS cassette that’s been rewound and recorded over for 21 years. Director Alan Taylor (of the unmemorable Thor: The Dark World) gives us images — a thumbs-up, an abandoned factory, a liquid-metal cop smashing through the windshield of a car…
On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, the LA Weekly’s Amy Nicholson and the Village Voice’s Alan Scherstuhl in New York disagree on just about everything in Ted 2 — except that it has a few very funny moments — but only after revisiting the impressive Inside Out, which is…
Just after the recent success of their Stanley Kubrick mini-retrospective that included A Clockwork Orange, 2001: A Space Odyssey & The Shining, O Cinema Miami Beach is delivering yet another retrospective of a well-known filmmaker this month. Kicking off June 26th, the filmmaker of choice is the man who pretty…
Since premiering his latest feature, The Strongest Man, at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, Miami-based filmmaker Kenny Riches only has had good news to report. His biggest coup: winning a distribution deal with FilmBuff, a national indie distributor that has arranged for a VOD release of the film…
Some movies are indefensible, and Ted 2 is one of them. Not only is this a movie about a libidinous, foul-mouthed stuffed bear; it’s the sequel to an earlier movie about a libidinous, foul-mouthed stuffed bear. But I laughed and laughed at Ted 2 — as I did at the…
Miami resident Liz Nolan, 23, will be joining the cast of CBS’s summer reality show, Big Brother. The show, a broadcast television staple, now in its 17th season, features 14 contestants locked in a house, their every move filmed, as fellow cast members vote on who’s allowed to remain in…
There’s no reverie that Alonso Ruizpalacios’ Güeros can’t shatter, no presumed truth it can’t complicate, no expectation of closure it won’t dash. Set in Mexico City during 1999’s 292-day student strike at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, the film is about — if any one thing — proximity to decisiveness,…
One of the nastiest tricks the bastards ever played was to convince so many artists that it’s best never to be strident. In the name of aesthetics or audience-pleasing or just not wanting to come off as shrill, a great many artists deny themselves — and their art — both…
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl may not be the best teen cancer weepie ever made, if there even is a best teen cancer weepie. But it’s surely the most adorable, for better or worse — less like The Fault in Our Stars and more like Diary of a…
Part of what makes writer-director Rick Famuyiwa’s Dope so fresh and joyous is that in many key ways it’s not new at all. Like Dazed & Confused or The Breakfast Club, this is a film about just how weird the extraordinarily normal kids are — kids like you. The teen…
The first time we cry, as newborns, might be the purest emotion we ever feel. We sob — a raw mess of tears and terror — and a big human rushes to give comfort. Mentally, the connection is made: Our feelings trigger a response, be it hugs or milk or simply that we are heard.
Part of what makes writer-director Rick Famuyiwa’s Dope so fresh and joyous is that in many key ways it’s not new at all. Here’s a dramatic teen comedy, flavor-crystaled with sex and drugs and innocent raunch, about good friends who get caught up in bad business on their way to…
No one recognized Rick Famuyiwa when he strolled up to the Ladera Park basketball courts on a bright weekday afternoon. In January, the lanky, 41-year-old director’s new comedy, Dope — a crowd-pleasing high school flick about nerds who dress like Kid ‘N Play, dream of going to Harvard and bash…
After a decade of TV work and a not-bad kids flick, director Joe Dante — like his ’03 Looney Tunes — is back in action. But instead of harking to the matinees that once inspired him, his zombie-girlfriend embarrassment Burying the Ex digs back into less promising territory: early seasons of Two and a Half Men…
By now, you must have seen Sunday night’s season five finale of Game of Thrones. And if you haven’t, you were either living under a rock or binge watching Orange is the New Black. (If it was the latter, you’re forgiven.) So if you’re not yet caught up with this…
Prison life is reliably repetitive, but conditions can be frighteningly unstable, too. Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black, which returns for its third season on June 12, reflects that paradoxical state of affairs by delivering more of the same — heartfelt but complicated relationships, inspired capers, compelling personalities, stomach-twisting flips…
In Jurassic World, Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic Park reboot — set 22 years after dinosaurs began walking the Earth, again — brontosauruses, stegosauruses, and velociraptors have become old hat, sort of like the mechanical Abe Lincoln at Disney World. Meanwhile, the habitat around them has gone Vegas.
