How convinced you’ll be by Soaked in Bleach, the latest vehicle for the Kurt-was-murdered theory the private investigator Tom Grant has now megaphoned for two decades, will hinge on how plausible you find its portrait of the Nirvana frontman approaching his end. The film insists that Cobain, far from the…
Hometown hero Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is in negotiations to star in and produce a remake of John Carpenter‘s cult classic Big Trouble in Little China; this is indeed, a thing that seems to be on the verge of almost certainly happening. Johnson, coming off a $54 million domestic opening weekend…
iZombie is about as sunny and optimistic as the zombie genre gets, which of course isn’t all that much. Even by supernatural standards, it’s a bloodthirsty canon, demanding regular sacrifices of innocents and grisly feats of skull splitting and cerebellum cannibalizing. The CW’s Seattle neo-noir boasts plenty of both to…
On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, the Village Voice’s Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek, along with Amy Nicholson of LA Weekly, praise the latest Melissa McCarthy comedy, Spy: “She plays a real woman who reacts like a real woman would,” Nicholson says of her character. “It’s a really funny…
Another month, another series of classic films, and with each one, the line-up only grows! Trying to come up with a totally comprehensive list is impossible at this point, but we’ll try to give everyone a solid oversight of all the good ol’ features showing in Miami this month. This…
Miami Dade College’s Miami International Film Festival is changing the rules for its competition and programming, and that could be good news for festival goers looking for quality cinema. The new rules are designed to attract bigger named filmmakers, but are also more inclusive for producers of short films, and…
The Melissa McCarthy of Spy is different from the one who rose to prominence by crapping in a sink. Bridesmaids scored her an Oscar nomination, and for the ceremony McCarthy donned a glamorous rose gown with a diamond collar and belt.
Tiller Russell’s The Seven Five lets the most corrupt (convicted) NYC cop of the ’80s tell his own story. He relishes the chance.
The first line in Entourage is a good indication of what the next 104 minutes will bring. Peering through binoculars while a speedboat carries him toward a yacht in the dazzling waters of Ibiza, Johnny Drama (Kevin Dillon), the big brother of megastar Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier), glimpses the bikini-clad babes who await him and informs us, “I may have to jerk it before I even get there!”
The closeup, ostensibly one of a filmmaker’s most valuable tools, is now so overused that it’s practically meaningless. Thanks to TV — and to our habit of watching big-screen movies on increasingly smaller ones — we’re now so used to seeing a shot of one actor talking, followed by a shot of another responding, ad nauseam, that this volley of visual dullness barely registers anymore.
Frédéric Auburtin’s absurdly hagiographic drama United Passions purports to tell the history of FIFA — the world’s governing institution for soccer — from its 1904 founding up until its announcement of South Africa as the host country for the 2010 World Cup.
A movie about bringing down druglords that’s actually mostly about movies, Cédric Jimenez’s The Connection is stretched over driven-cop beats so familiar American audiences could probably follow it without subtitles. (It’s in French — add that to the title, and you get a sense of its police-film ambitions.)
What does the world sound like when you’re Brian Wilson? When you’ve made a record that sounds like cirrus clouds look — as Wilson did with the Beach Boys’ small modern miracle of harmony, the 1966 Pet Sounds — all bets are off when it comes to the way ordinary aural signals are processed on their journey through ear canal to eardrum and beyond.
When John Cusack was launching his career in the ’80s, Brian Wilson had gone from rock star to living lore — a brilliant Bigfoot. “People would have Brian Wilson encounters,” says Cusack, who plays Wilson in the new biopic Love & Mercy.
Twenty years ago, at the height of the UFO boom, the truest believers in alien abduction scenarios would argue that their most compelling evidence was the commonalities between regular people’s stories of nighttime visitations. Even under hypnosis, “abductees” testified to remarkably consistent waking-dream terrors…
The irony behind the innocence of much of The Beach Boys music is that the band’s main songwriter, Brian Wilson, was in fact insane. He has long admitted that voices inside his head inspired his music, and he was driven by a perfectionist’s OCD to do those voices justice. So…
Good or bad, Cameron Crowe movies build to improbable declarations of sincerity, to the great acts or speeches a man must loose from himself into a world too cynical to value them. His heroes always must filibuster regular life with their decency. Superficially, these acts and speeches are performed in…
A witty comedy from Spain will have its U.S. premiere at Coral Gables Art Cinema this Friday. The red carpet will be rolled out for director/writer/lead actor, Daniel Castro, who will make a personal appearance for the event. Ilusión, Castro’s feature debut, takes aim at the world of popular filmmaking on…
The San Andreas fault stretches 810 miles up the Pacific coast, roughly the length of a dozen Dwayne “The Rock” Johnsons lying end to end. When it rumbles, we’ll need all 12 of him to spring into action — although, as Brad Peyton’s San Andreas warns, that still won’t be enough to save the day.
As a middle-aged woman, I rarely have a conversation with other middle-aged women in which the subject of movies “for us” fails to come up. As a critic, I don’t really think of movies in terms of which ones are “for” me and which are not, but I know what these women mean.
Here’s the ingredients of most of today’s lefty issues docs: doom, doom, Koch brothers, Monsanto, doom, doom, CNN clips, doom, doom, upbeat guitars and the promise that everything can change if we just get involved. Andrew Morgan’s The True Cost leaves the Koches out of its rundown of the damage…
Poltergeist 2015 is to Poltergeist ’82 what today’s shipped-frozen-to-the-store Pizza Hut dough is to the kneaded-on-site pies the chain’s stoned cooks tossed in the Reagan era. It’s the same kind of thing, with the same shape and some shared ingredients, but the texture’s gone limp, and there’s no sense of…
