He couldn’t have known it at the time, but James Brown’s debut recording and first chart hit — made in 1956 with the Famous Flames — is a question that contains its own answer. The lyrics to “Please, Please, Please” speak, pretty obviously, of sexual desire. But Brown’s voice is…
“The heart wants what it wants,” Woody Allen has taught us, and apparently what his heart wants these days is not to have to bother with writing second drafts of film scripts. His latest, Magic in the Moonlight, plays like a sumptuous vacation, its stars larking in ’20s finery about…
Mood Indigo is bitter candy, a heartbreaker that uses sugar as a trap. The director, Michel Gondry, has a brilliant, contradictory brain. He’s a swoony pessimist, a big-dreaming romantic who believes in love at first sight but never lets his films end with a kiss. Instead, his idea of a…
As an ER physician, Dr. Ryan McGarry is probably the only filmmaker Cultist can forgive for calling in for a scheduled interview five hours late. Speaking via phone from New York City, where he moved last year to work at Cornell Medical Center at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, the 32-year-old doctor…
For Edson Jean and Joshua Jean-Baptiste, the true story of Miami is made up of a million small vignettes of daily life that come together to create our collective reality. The two New World School Of Arts graduates are Haitian Americans who want to tell a uniquely Miami tale of…
For all of Marvel’s out-there and enthusiastic actors, there are always a couple that lean towards the calm and quiet side of things. But you probably wouldn’t expect Guardians of the Galaxy’s David Bautista, a wrestler, to be that kind of guy. His character, Drax the Destroyer, might be an…
With Jack Nicholson still enjoying his retirement, it falls to Michael Douglas to swoon over the oh-so-cutesy Diane Keaton in And So It Goes, a timid, elder rom-com in the same wheelhouse as the 2003 Nicholson-Keaton team-up, Something’s Gotta Give. A film of nothing but soft edges, director Rob Reiner’s…
With his stately drawl, Morgan Freeman has narrated nonfiction documentaries about penguins, slavery, the lemurs of Madagascar, ancient Egyptian pharaohs, and the expansion of the universe. His is a voice of authority tempered by warmth and wisdom, capable of evoking felt human experience and the majesty of creation. In writer-director…
One could be forgiven for being skeptical that a Hercules movie starring Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson and directed by Brett “Rush Hour Trilogy” Ratner might have a brain in its head, but it actually does. We’re not talking Snowpiercer levels of intelligence, but it’s far less aggressively stupid than, say,…
On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, Amy Nicholson of the L.A. Weekly and Stephanie Zacharek of The Village Voice interview film critic and author Karina Longworth, who’s just launched a fascinating new podcast on the history of Hollywood called You Must Remember This. [Subscribe to the Voice Film Club…
If the clothes of Yves Saint Laurent were groundbreaking, the designer’s mystique was as subtle as the curve of an invisibly molded sleeve. Those who have picked up just a little Saint Laurent lore may know about his beginnings at the House of Dior in the late ’50s and his…
Uncomfortable-silence auteur Joe Swanberg has made a career of testing how much falseness you can strip out and still have a movie. What if people on-screen talked like people off it, and they spent as much time looking at phones and laptops as you do, and if their moments of…
Surely, at some point, they thought of casting Michael Cera. Richard Ayoade’s often marvelous The Double, an existential jest set in a bureaucratic dystopia so familiar and lightly comic that it may as well be Kafka Fantasy Camp, stars Jessie Eisenberg, the Oscar winner and future Lex Luthor, as a…
Philip Seymour Hoffman is an island of rumpled calm in Anton Corbijn’s urgent A Most Wanted Man, a glum-out-of-principle espionage story based on a John Le Carré novel. The role demands that Hoffman be quiet, steady, and occasionally frustrated and that he hold secrets — often from us, which is…
The business of childhood is the business of waiting: waiting for Christmas, waiting for school to let out, waiting to be old enough to stay up past nine. No other movie I can think of captures the wistfulness of those days full of waiting than Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, an ambitious…
Gabe Klinger’s Double Play is a tidy documentary about two creative brains: directors James Benning and Richard Linklater. Benning, the elder of the two, shoots austerely beautiful experimental films that force the audience to, say, stare at seagulls swooshing across a mirrored pond. (The irony of people needing to huddle…
When the traveling indie documentary filmmaker Vincent Moon comes to Miami for a retrospective of his work and a two-day workshop, he hopes to find something to add to his nearly 700-strong catalog of films. “I don’t really know the city at all,” he admits, speaking via phone from Rio…
Practically every day this month, I’ve found myself getting into arguments with someone about how important representation is in media. As many studies have shown, not everyone who goes to the movies or watches television is a generic upper-middle class, straight, white cis male. But when you get down to…
If you weren’t able to try first-hand The Purge Breakout Experience when it rolled into Wynwood last month, the horror gods (no, not Joss Whedon) have taken pity on you. Universal Studios Orlando will be implementing its very own version of a Purge experience during this year’s Halloween Horror Nights…
For a modern stand-up comedian, the biggest commercial achievement is the stand-up concert film — not just an hour-long special, but a feature-length film released in movie theaters. They are rare, because few stand-ups have the right mix of ability and marketability to compete with spaceships and superheroes. But Gabriel…
iOye, mamasita! Yeah, we’re hollering at you, because you’re a hot Latina lady and we think you should be on our television screens. Miami is known for many things, but as Jack Donaghy eloquently puts it, we’re mostly known for our looks and culture: “Why does anyone go to Miami?…
If the Saw series taught us anything, it’s that every quasi-inventive genre movie is fated to become a yearly franchise with increasingly diminishing returns. The Purge practically cried out for this treatment from its premise alone: James DeMonaco’s film had a big idea — a near-future in which “any and…
