Going to Brazil to see movies is inconvenient. First of all, it’s plenty far away. Second, it’s really hard to keep the theater seats hygienic in the tropics when everyone wears only a thong. Fortunately, a whole slew of Brazilian films are tanned, hairless, and on their way to you…
The Act of Killing is one of the most breathtaking horror films you’ll ever see. The documentary by Danish-American filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer dives into the psyches of several paramilitary men and gangsters who helped massacre over a million so-called “communists” in Indonesia following a military coup in 1965. Melding dramatized…
At the movies, straightforward storytelling, the kind in which a director and his cast push a story forward in waves of action and feeling, has become so out of fashion it’s almost avant-garde. Moviegoers, it seems, need to be cool: not too moved, not too surprised, not too impressed. We…
Besides its dozen or so big laughs and its winning streak of middle-upper-crust romantic jadedness, Dan Mazer’s I Give It a Year has going for it a trait you might have thought had been bred out of audience-pleasing romantic comedies by now: suspense about with whom its leads will find…
Pouncing on the chance to cover the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, resulting in her controversial pronouncement about the disparity between “the mediocrity of the man” and “the horror of the deeds,” writer-philosopher Hannah Arendt is brought to life by a mesmerizing Barbara Sukowa in Margarethe von Trotta’s film. Despite…
More terrifying than any horror film and more intellectually adventurous than just about any 2013 release so far, The Act of Killing is a major achievement, a work about genocide that rightly earns its place alongside Shoah as a supreme testament to the cinema’s capacity for inquiry, confrontation, and remembrance…
Despite the giddy, gory ridiculousness of Kick-Ass 2, this summer’s most violent yet least punishing comic-book movie, there’s a kernel of ugly human truth at the core of the Kick-Ass fantasy. In the first issue of Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s Kick-Ass comic, from 2008, a lonely high school…
Tomorrow night, theaters around Miami will show the ’90s so-bad-it’s-good classic Starship Troopers – with a little something extra. The folks behind ’90s TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000, which featured a human and his robot friends yelling things at cheesy movies, give the same treatment to modern movies under…
We here at Cultist got into a bit of a scuffle with the New York Post last week when a review of SyFy’s Heroes of Cosplay show ended up offending all of cosplay-kind. Last night marked the premiere of the show, so we decided to see for ourselves how the…
Ever find yourself wondering what Jon Favreau is up to lately? Yeah, didn’t think so. Sexy screen siren and money-making machine Sofia Vergara, on the other hand? If you’re into the ladies, you’re probably holding your breath until her next bikini tweet. So let this serve as your official Vergara…
“The last thing I remember is Hannah,” says Dexter as he wakes up stranded in the middle of nowhere. (According to his GPS, it’s Kendall.) So episode seven, “Dress Code,” begins. The Hannah Dexter is fondly remembering is Hannah McKay, the one that got away. So many puns with that…
Breaking Bad is easily the best television show currently running, and only The Wire can challenge its all-time supremacy. The riveting saga of what happens when a mild-mannered science teacher dying from cancer makes a fatally bad decision to cook methamphetamine has more twists and turns than the wildest ride…
The stars of The Real Housewives of Miami can be entertaining, sure — if you’re into drag queen drama, blowjob controversies, terrifying plastic surgery, and throwing people into pools. But let’s be real about these “Real” Housewives. They’re wacky and tacky enough for Bravo franchises based in cities like New…
If you who can’t wait to use floo powder to transport yourself to the new Diagon Alley expansion happening at Universal Studios Orlando next summer, Universal has come up with a magically brilliant plan to hold you over. Announced Wednesday, Universal Orlando Resort will be hosting a Harry Potter Celebration…
Linda Lovelace spent more time typing than taking off her clothes. In her one year in the porn business, she shot a single feature and a handful of shorts. In the 14 years after, she wrote four autobiographies. Only Monica Lewinsky spun such notoriety from a couple of quick BJs…
It’s tempting, after watching the exceptional Museum Hours, to describe director Jem Cohen’s visual style as chiefly “observational.” The film, a kind of hybrid between understated drama and essayistic tourism, approaches its subjects with uncommon patience and curiosity, lingering over objects and faces as if to savor their aesthetic qualities,…
Movie stars shouldn’t be subject to the rules of gravity, as we mere mortals are. One of the great pleasures of watching actors is to see them move, and when yesterday’s youngsters start creaking, we feel it in our joints. That’s not to say actors can’t age gracefully, or that…
For anyone who’s been going to the movies at all regularly over the past 45 years, Woody Allen is practically family. His movies may draw fewer passionate responses than they did in the ’70s and ’80s, but we still feel compelled to reckon with him. Whenever Allen comes out with…
How would those Bronze Age storytellers who shaped and handed down the myths of Ancient Greece fare in a modern screenwriting seminar? All that elusive, improvisatory strangeness, that alien sense of causality, that emphasis on origins, not just of franchisable characters but of everything in the natural world, right down…
You can guess the plot of Disney’s Planes — it’s just Cars 2 with wings, an international romp that pits a humble country bumpkin against a fleet of literally jet-setting competitors in a race around the world. With pit stops in four continents, more cultural stereotypes than the Eurovision song…
If there’s one nuance mainstream comedies have yet to learn, it’s that “empathetic” need not mean “likable” — audiences can feel for characters they don’t necessarily want to be. The hit black comedy Horrible Bosses, which had three angry underlings plotting murderous vengeance against their you-know-whats, should have been a…
Writer-director Paul Andrew Williams’s Unfinished Song is a full-frontal attack on its audience’s tear ducts. Shamelessly manipulative, it’s a highly effective if not very good film, its success entirely due to the talents of its cast. They bring heart to a script that is unabashedly about pushing buttons. Vanessa Redgrave…
