De Palma’s Passion Is All Tricks — and Undervalued

Your life surges ahead as it is, pretty much, but maybe tinted blue. Maybe everything around you is tilted a bit, and strips of light glow on the wall, like an SUV with its brights on is idling on a ramp facing your window blinds. Your world looks not like…

Seidl’s Paradise Trilogy Takes on Christly Fervor

Coming at us in sections like baby-boomer stations of the cross, Ulrich Seidl’s Dantean triptych Paradise is inarguably one of the year’s big moviehouse shitstorms, and appropriately this second panel, coming after Love’s bruising tropical-tourism anti-daydream, doesn’t spare the rod. As you’d expect, Faith takes the Divine Comedy fixtures head-on…

One Direction: This Is Us Is Barely a Documentary

Morgan Spurlock loves money. His documentaries are fascinated by cheap cheeseburgers, product placement, and freakonomics, and his latest commodity is Brit boy band One Direction, five lads shoved together by Simon Cowell on X-Factor. They can’t dance, and they can’t even convince us that they’re fans of their own music,…

The Artist and the Model: Less Enthralling Than Insulting

John Berger quipped, “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at,” an observation recalled by this anachronistic picture of Fernando Trueba’s, which offers as generic a portrait of its central relationship as its title suggests. In WWII France, elderly artist Marc Cros (Jean Rochefort) has seen his well…

Five Great Summer Movies You Might Have Missed (And Can Still Catch!)

As another summer movie season characterized by cynicism and excess draws to a close, there are few activities less valuable or interesting than complaining about it. The blockbusters arrived, flattened cities, vomited effects, deafened with explosions, made money, didn’t make enough money, pleased populist critics, displeased elitist critics, and finally…

Getaway: Selena Gomez and Ethan Hawke in Merciful 2-D

When Justin Bieber’s favorite actress, Selena Gomez, survives a bad B movie with more dignity than her costar, Oscar nominee Ethan Hawke, the end times must be near. In Getaway, Hawke is Brent Magna, a failed racecar driver turned crook turned reformed husband who returns to his Sofia, Bulgaria apartment…

Ten Fascinating Facts from Slimed!, the New Oral History of ’90s Nickelodeon

After Jimmy Savile, Amanda Bynes, Lindsay Lohan, and that Christian puppeteer who wanted to kidnap, kill, and eat little boys, it’s hard not to imagine the children’s entertainment industry as a fount of unimaginable filth and degeneracy. But for those who’d prefer to remember their childhoods happily, Mathew Klickstein offers…

Top Five Breaking Bad End-of-Series Predictions

Breaking Bad is nearing an end, and what will happen is anyone’s guess. With Jesse snapping and Hank becoming increasingly desperate, Walt’s life is now beginning to spiral out of control. With only six episodes left in the series, Vince Gilligan will spare no air time with sub-plots. However, the…

Breaking Bad Insults Belize Tourism Board, Gets a Free Vacation

If you’ve been watching Breaking Bad this season, you’ve likely picked up on a subtle and not-so-complimentary metaphor for our neighbors just across the Caribbean in Belize. Without giving too much away, Walter White has been covering up for a character he killed by telling everybody he fled to Belize…

Burn Notice Fire Sale: Everything on the Show Up for Auction

In case you hadn’t heard, Burn Notice is going up in smoke. And the end of this seven-season, Miami-set series means they’re hosting one hell of a fire sale. Everything must go! As the show’s last few episodes air and the cast evacuates the Coconut Grove Convention Center, they’re ditching…

In Crystal Fairy, Michael Cera Gives a Great, Drug-Addled Performance

With an offhand precision that suggests he might prove one of his generation’s major actors, Michael Cera lays bare two specific human weaknesses in writer/director Sebastián Silva’s altered-states/group dynamics road drama Crystal Fairy — weaknesses you’ll likely recognize from life rather than from other movies. The first is the pushy,…

The World’s End Is a Likable Brew, but Not for the Ages

The laddish pleasures of The World’s End, Edgar Wright’s comedy about a group of middle-aged guys drinking beer and facing mortality, come with a bittersweet edge. In the old days, the lead character, Gary King, used to be the coolest kid in school, at least in the outlaw sense: He’d…

Paul Rudd Charms in Prince Avalanche

Here’s a humble wig-out, a curio that could endure beyond its creators’ more demonstrably successful works — and for decades will certainly confound audiences who think they’re streaming/torrenting/eye-jacking some broad Paul Rudd comedy they had forgotten about. Prince Avalanche director David Gordon Green gives star Rudd more chances to charm…