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…
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…
You might think the world of reality TV is a ladies’ game. But you’d be wrong. Housewives be damned; many reality shows reflect the unfortunate reality of the glass ceiling for professional women. Take the Million Dollar Listing franchise, for example. Bravo’s Los Angeles original and New York spin-offs both…
From the very start of the first episode of Million Dollar Listing Miami, you can already tell it’s going to be one saucy season. What else would you expect from a show that puts a zoom lens on our city’s luxury real estate market and the players who run it? …
With the newest addition to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios, fans will get to experience what it’s really like to be a witch or wizard wandering the streets of Diagon Alley. For all your wizardry needs, there’s a place to buy your schoolbooks, robes, approved pets,…
The weekend’s here, and with it comes one of the Bill Cosford Cinema’s first 35mm screenings since becoming a finalist for the Knight Arts Challenge. As expected, the Cosford Classics series is furthering its exploration of interesting filmmakers; this time, the name of the man is Jean-Luc Godard. Playing one…
Recently, Star Wars fans, along with much of the planet’s pop-culture collective, nearly ruptured the internet in their enthusiasm to share set-building photos from next year’s long-awaited new feature film. But these weren’t shots of just any set. They depicted the construction of the Millennium Falcon. You’ve never heard of…
It’s a great time to be a fan of movie musicals. Since the year 2000, theaters across the country have been filled with movies built to inspire audiences to gleefully sing along. Some disasters have come along the way — Les Misérables, Phantom of the Opera, and Rock of Ages…
“Destroy your safe and happy lives before it is too late,” the Mekons once sang. The smug suburban Dutch family in writer-director Alex van Warmerdam’s bleakly comic allegory Borgman never got the memo, which leaves them open to a peculiar and languorously sinister home invasion. Not even the backyard is…
As a movie, Agnieszka Holland’s four-hour Cold War drama Burning Bush makes for first-rate television. That’s no swipe. Rather, it’s an acknowledgment that, no matter how sophisticated cable serial storytelling has gotten or how episodic the latest superhero flicks, movies remain something different. Burning Bush trembles with hushed urgency, with…
If you think summer movies are clamorous, try a current Broadway musical. Watching Jersey Boys onstage is like soldiering through some extreme-eating contest where you’re force-fed dessert for three hours. It’s all falsetto heroics and hustled-through character drama, every beat of every scene overscored, overrehearsed, and overbearing. And it’s often…
The Rover, Australian filmmaker David Michôd’s followup to the brutish family drama Animal Kingdom, is a postapocalyptic Western from the Outback, a stretch of land that already looks like the world has been blown away. All Michôd needs to convince us of the devastation is a title card pegging the…
Recently, Star Wars fans, along with much of the planet’s pop-culture collective, nearly ruptured the internet in their enthusiasm to share set-building photos from next year’s long-awaited new feature film. But these weren’t shots of just any set. They depicted the construction of the Millennium Falcon. You’ve never heard of…
“Wherever you live in this world, basically . . . you are alone. Even if [we] have support systems, we’re really alone.” Those words, shorn of sentimentality, are offered—and received—as motherly balm in the documentary When I Walk. Filmmaker Jason DaSilva, having turned his camera on himself to capture the…
Ravenous is a film-shaped UFO: It’s so delightfully weird that its very existence defies logic. Imagine a film that makes A Modest Proposal–style satire out of Dracula’s gothic horror tropes in the spaghetti western milieu of The Great Silence. It’s a pitch-black comedy about Manifest Destiny and cannibal frontiersmen. Set…
A comedy about abortion. A documentary chronicling the gay experience in Israel. The avant garde work of a legendary film director. These are not obvious choices for a relatively conservative Jewish audience. But Miami Jewish Film Festival director Igor Shteyrenberg isn’t taking the obvious route to film festival success in…
For the first time in his life, actor Brontis Jodorowsky will have a few days to get to know Miami. Speaking via Skype from his home in Paris, the son of the legendary cult film director Alejandro Jodorowsky says he has only ever known the city from within Miami International…
Some genres of film don’t get as much talk and praise as they deserve. Take sci-fi, for example; it’s so heavily loaded with big-budget flicks that the smaller works get lost over the years. And that means a lot of great works that never get seen by large audiences. Sure,…
A major achievement in sunny wretchedness, Álex de la Iglesia’s splatter-comedy Witching & Bitching projectile-pukes its outrages with a gusto recalling the early days of those (sadly) reformed upchuckers Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson. De la Iglesia doesn’t share those directors’ interest in making clear just why characters do the…
If you ever have days when you prefer animals to human beings, How to Train Your Dragon 2 is your kind of movie. In some ways, the second entry in this animated franchise is inferior to the first, released in 2010: The plot is needlessly busy, and much of the…
