When a relatively young actor dies suddenly, as James Gandolfini did in June, it’s tempting to wonder about the roles he’ll never get to play. When we didn’t know we’d be losing him so soon, it was always fun to see Gandolfini show up, a casual surprise: In 2012 alone,…
If five Oscar nominees lose two young girls in the woods, will their wailing make a sound? That’s the key question of Prisoners, Denis Villeneuve’s prestigious puffery about a father (Hugh Jackman) and a cop (Jake Gyllenhaal) trying to catch a kidnapper. Prisoners is a dog whistle for Academy voters…
Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s C.O.G. is the first film to be based on the work of David Sedaris. It’s clearly a passion project for Alvarez, and the picture is faithful to the events of the autobiographical story “C.O.G.,” about Sedaris working in rural Oregon to see how “real” people live (and…
Forbidden fruit has never seemed so poisonous than in Thanks for Sharing, a remarkably sensitive and surprisingly romantic ensemble drama about sex addiction. A winsome mix of funny, harrowing, and smart, it’s most commendable for making characters who are addicted to bad behavior — and who refuse to blame themselves…
It might take the viewer a moment to realize that the voiceover guiding us through director Mark Kendall’s documentary La Camioneta is meant to be the thoughts of one of the refurbished buses that are part of the film’s focus. In dulcet tones, the audience is served a healthy portion…
There’s something unsettling about Anne Fontaine’s Adore, and, surprisingly, it has nothing to do with the film’s two middle-aged women who fall in love with each other’s teenage sons. The cougars in question are Lil and Roz, best friends since childhood played with notable earnestness by Naomi Watts and Robin…
Just as tedious as waiting in a dentist’s office for an hour and a half, Lynn Shelton’s latest fumblingly cutesy outing ought to be her last. (Sadly, it is not — she’s already wrapped production on a dark comedy starring Keira Knightley and Sam Rockwell.) Using a script instead of…
You have every reason to be skeptical. We’ve suffered years of 3D cash-grabs. This spring visited upon us a cheap-jack James Franco grimacing through the stubbornly un-magical Oz the Great and Powerful. And the movies have only gotten L. Frank Baum right precisely once, in 1939. Return to Oz,Walter Murch’s…
Early in the documentary Generation Iron, bodybuilding icon Arnold Schwarzenegger observes that “Bodybuilding falls into this unique category of being a sport, entertainment, being a way of life, and art.” It’s an uneasy quartet of ideas forced to harmonize within bodies intentionally made freakish and/or beautiful. Director Vlad Yudin spends…
Lizzy Caplan as Virginia Johnson and Michael Sheen as William MastersIn 1957, the same year that The Ed Sullivan Show refused to shoot Elvis below the waist, a gynecologist and a former nightclub singer began hooking strangers up to electrodes and asking them to fuck in the name of science…
Long before Arnold was the Governator, the Terminator, or cheating hubby of Maria Shriver, he was the original meathead. A legend in the bodybuilding world, Schwarzenegger was immortalized onscreen in the classic bodybuilding flick Pumping Iron. Arnold’s achievements launched a generation of bodybuilders who’ve since taken the sport to new…
Dexter the show is gearing up to finish its successful eight year run, and Dexter the character is gearing up to start a new life with a new wife. Both events were blatantly paralleled in last night’s eleventh episode. It began with the ceremonial cleansing of the hands – as…
Survivor is back for its 27th season on CBS, and this time around the twist is that previous contestants return to the island and will be competing with relatives or significant others, hence the title: Blood vs. Water. Kat Edorsson, 24, Orlando native and Survivor: One World alum, returns this…
In Andrew Bujalski’s admirable, vaunted 2002 debut, Funny Ha Ha, the microbudget auteur and occasional actor’s nervous temp, Mitchell, ineffectually attempts to seduce an aloof young lady over a bedroom chess match. As if pawns themselves, dependably obeying the established rules of conduct, the characters in Bujalski’s films are consistently…
Like The Wire or Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s oeuvre, Short Term 12 is the kind of film that sounds agonizingly depressing on paper but mesmerizes onscreen. It’s a delicate yet passionate creation, modest in scope but almost overwhelming in its emotional intricacy, ambition, and resonance. Easily one of the best…
“There’s some definite movement in the yard!” If you imagine that line spoken by the pimply, squeaky-voiced teen who works every drive-thru on The Simpsons, you get some sense of the awkward confrontation that director Cullen Hoback has with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg during the riveting climax of his death-of-privacy…
“When Beeswax came out in 2009, I felt like there was a sense in the world of, ‘Well, that’s another one of the same from him,'” writer-director Andrew Bujalski says by telephone. “That frustrated me. I wanted to shake everybody by the collar and say, ‘No, can’t you see that…
Mademoiselle C Dethrones the “Muse” Title of Former French Vogue Editor
We’ll always have Iron Man, they must be telling each other in Hollywood. As summer wanes, the hulking corpses of would-be blockbusters litter the home-video distribution channels like fallen Kaiju from Guillermo Del Toro’s giant-‘bots-vs.-giant-beasts movie Pacific Rim, the most enjoyable of 2013’s many urban-renewing summer blockbusters. In Del Toro’s…
Understandably, Peter Mayhew is not as well-known as Harrison Ford or Mark Hamill. But W. Ryan Ziegler wants to change that. The first-time filmmaker is now raising money on Kickstarter for Standing in the Stars: The Peter Mayhew Story, a documentary about the 7-foot-3 actor who played Chewbacca in the…
Insidious Chapter 2 picks up where its predecessor left off — in abject silliness. As before, director James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell’s wannabe-scary story indulges in innumerable demonic-possession tropes before closing with a ridiculous finale set on an “astral plane” known as “The Further” where evil spirits lurk. That’s…
Brian De Palma had a good reason for remaking the erotic French thriller Love Crime: He could do it better. “I think it’s very dangerous to remake a classic,” says De Palma. “Leave it alone.” But the 2010 corporate cat fight flick about two female frenemies had a framework he…
