Film, TV & Streaming

After Tiller Visits the Last Three Clinics Performing Late-Term Abortions

Tom Hanks has built a career out of playing aggressively noble roles, so it’s only natural to want to see him taken down a peg. But it’s no fun to watch him suffer at the hands of Somali pirates in Paul Greengrass’s true-life adventure Captain Phillips. Hanks plays the commander…

Sometimes it’s the little things in a movie that get you. Early in George Tillman Jr.’s The Inevitable Defeat of Mister & Pete, a bright but obstreperous 13-year-old inner-city kid — the Mister of the title, played by Skylan Brooks — bounces back from the trauma of getting an F…

Something’s seemed different about No. 1 American action hero Bruce Willis lately. His action movie output in recent years has mostly been stunt casting in mediocre sequels (The Expendables 2, G.I. Joe: Retaliation), or supporting roles in little-seen B-movies (Setup, Catch .44, Fire with Fire), as if he’s in a…

© 2013 – Troublemaker StudiosTrejo in Machete Kills.In this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, our critics discuss Captain Phillips and Machete Kills, both out on Friday, October 11…

I’m pretty sure the dumbest way to die is killing yourself upon discovering that faking your own death has tricked your forbidden lover into his or her own suicide. The second might be to get gutted in one of the jumbled, perfunctory sword fights that clang up the streets of…

A fragmented, self-important film noir veneration of a Hollywood icon; that’s Meditation, Creativity, Peace. Though the Eat, Pray, Love-esque title might imply that it’s a movie that champions positive personal gain through meditation, it instead only seems to advocate one thing: David Lynch. As part of III Points Festival this…

The parking was limited at the studio warehouse where Magic City was filmed, but that didn’t stop the cars from filling up the lot and parking along the street in order to get a piece of the live auction Saturday and Sunday. Playing on a flat screen TV (certainly not…

Mornin’, Miami! Did you party too hard at III Points this weekend? Drink your sorrows away after the Dolphins’ loss yesterday? Or do you just hate mornings? If you’re dragging this a.m., then congratulations — you have something in common with Miley Cyrus. On Saturday Night Live last weekend, Cyrus…

Perhaps the best and worst thing about young teenagers is that they’re capable of what George W. Bush fans used to call “great moral clarity.” In HBO’s sure-to-make-you-bawl documentary Valentine Road, Aliyah, a student at E.O. Green Junior High School in Oxnard, California, breaks down the differences between gayness and…

GravityOn this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, the Village Voice’s Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek both praise Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (starring George Clooney and Sandra Bullock), saying the director exhibits a “lovely human touch” with the film, which is set in space, and that it’s “so different than anything else…

“What a shitty place to die.” Whatever your feelings about Dallas, that’s a pretty harsh assessment. Then again, the character in Peter Landesman’s well-intentioned but unfulfilling Parkland who says it, an aide to fallen President John F. Kennedy, can probably be forgiven for his snotty Yankee attitude. Next month marks…

The most revealing film ever made about kids and the appeal of violent fantasy isn’t Battle Royale or an adaptation of Lord of the Flies. It’s the shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark that a couple of Mississippi buddies put together over the course of their adolescence. Every…

The Great Santini with a pinch of Straw Dogs in French wine country, Gilles Legrand’s You Will Be My Son recalls the “A” pictures Hollywood has basically stopped making. Whether Legrand’s alternately compelling and clichéd drama of father-son struggles achieves the greatness of the aforementioned films is another matter. Paul…

A quietly profound study of a complex marriage between two artists, Cutie and the Boxer details the relationship of Ushio Shinohara — an avant-garde icon known for his motorcycle sculptures and “action paintings” created by punching a canvas with paint-coated boxing gloves — and his loyal wife, Noriko. With regular…

For anyone itching to see Stephen Dorff portray an Israeli POW, your opportunity has finally arrived. Zaytoun follows Dorff’s Yoni, an Israeli pilot imprisoned by the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1982 Beirut. In captivity, he befriends Fahed (Abdallah El Akal), a fast-talking 12-year-old refugee and one of the PLO’s newly…

Some movies are so tense and deeply affecting that they shave years off your life as you’re watching, only to give back that lost time, and more, at the end. Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity is one of those movies. Sandra Bullock and George Clooney play astronauts — one a medical engineer,…

You think making it in the music business is hard? Tell that to Charles Bradley. But you might want to watch a documentary on his rise to the top first. The film Charles Bradley: Soul of America:, directed by Poull Brien and produced by Alexander Brough, follows Bradley through the…

In their experimental new film, Metallica endeavor to translate the anger and pain in their music into a visual medium. Directed by Nimród Antalis, Metallica Through the Neveris the band’s second big-screen effort, the first being being the 2004 behind-the-scenes documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster. That debut, created by…

Michael Ealy as an android copWhat will the Los Angeles Police Department look like in 35 years? According to Fox’s Almost Human, yet another hourlong sci-fi drama overseen by J.J. Abrams (Alias, Fringe), crime will increase 400 percent and police officers will partner with humanoid robots to defend the city…

Another Miami show cancelled, another auction of epic proportions. Magic City, the Starz timepiece drama set in the late 1950s South Florida, has met its end, and now there’s a heaping amount of set pieces to be rid of. The short-lived series told the story of a hotel mogul, Ike…

Ilan Hall, chef-owner of the Gorbals restaurant in downtown L.A.It began as a simple duel: two line cooks pitted against each other for culinary bragging rights in the kitchen of downtown L.A.’s the Gorbals. It was after-hours, ringmastered by chef and owner Ilan Hall. Sometimes Hall would compete for old…