Leonard Nimoy has died at the age of 83. Both on camera and off, he exemplified the best of what Star Trek, and thus humanity, could represent. Part of that was Trek’s writing, of course. But it was Nimoy who took what was on the page — often repaired what…
There was an awkward moment between Fifty Shades of Grey star Dakota Johnson and her mom, Melanie Griffith, on the red carpet before the Oscars on Sunday. But the world got to see Johnson’s impressive talent for pretending uncomfortable situations don’t seem to bother her (see also: Fifty Shades of…
In a cinematic universe where the rules for viability are changing almost daily, the film festival is becoming an endangered species. Less than 25 percent of them make it past the sixth year. But next week, Boulder International Film Festival will celebrate its eleventh season, which runs from March 5…
There are two kinds of humanist movie. One kind shows human beings struggling against the most unspeakable horrors, sorrows or injustices and still, somehow, emerging with their essential goodness intact. The second, thornier type gives us people doing terrible things to one another — screaming, cheating and generally making life…
If Grace Kelly had been raised by coyotes, she might have stalked the screen like Focus’s Margot Robbie, a va-va-voom blonde with bite. Robbie is too beautiful to play normal, too sly to play nice. Miscast as a shy saint in Craig Zobel’s upcoming Sundance hit Z for Zachariah, she…
Is it possible to like a movie yet feel revulsion toward its script? David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars is clearly intended as a sharp satire of Hollywood ambition, vanity, avarice and emptiness, and in places it’s smart and astringently funny. Yet it seems to be fighting its own bone…
Ten years ago, Wellington, New Zealand, was less welcoming of vampires. When Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, two unknown comedians, walked the streets in velvet frocks and ruffles for a 2005 sketch, dudes would drive by and scream homophobic slurs. Says Clement, “We were constantly abused.” Over the next decade,…
Where we come from defines us more than we even realize: That’s the idea implicit in Andrey Zvyagintsev’s somber, sturdily elegant drama Leviathan, in which a mechanic who has lived on the same parcel of land all his life — as his father and grandfather did before him — resists…
Connoisseurs of bad film know that The Room deserves a special place within the canon of so-bad-it’s-good cinema. By now the infamous film’s journey from director/writer/star Tommy Wiseau’s fever dream to the big screen has been well-documented, but nothing captures the story quite like producer and co-star Greg Sestero’s The…
Shocker of all shockers: the Fifty Shades of Grey movie sucked so hard it left a gaping hole where my soul used to be. Not that I didn’t anticipate maximum suckage since the book was also terrible, but I suppose I held out a vestige of hope that maybe the…
Kevin Costner eases white America into the now with McFarland, USA, we hear about the Berlin Film Festival’s highs (Queen of Earth) and lows (Knight of Cups), and dip into the lukewarm waters of a second Hot Tub Time Machine movie. Also, there’s much praise for teen comedy The DUFF and…
Shove off, John Hughes. The DUFF, a high-school comedy by Ari Sandel, opens by declaring that The Breakfast Club’s social categories are, like, way passé. Explains lead Bianca (Mae Whitman), “Jocks play video games, princesses are on antidepressants, and geeks rule the world.” Today, be ye goth kid, science dweeb…
Five years ago, four losers passed out in a jacuzzi, boiled back to 1986, healed their past wounds, rocked out to Poison, and returned to their timeline as gods. Thusly, Hot Tub Time Machine director Steve Pink was hailed as a minor deity: He’d taken a dumber-than-huffing-hairspray premise and made…
American Sniper notwithstanding, the first fresh multiplex trend to emerge in 2015 is Old White Dudes Learning to Share Their World. First came Kevin Costner in the sour Black or White, playing a coot who discovers that black folks love their kids, too, even in South Los Angeles. Then, in…
Sport is a natural metaphor for war. Two sides in two colors face each other on a field, each with their pride and their physical safety at risk. Their leaders scheme plans of attack, drawing arrows toward the enemy’s flank. And backing the teams in the stands — or, more…
“You ready for another miserable video game?” I heard one critic crack to another as I settled in for Jupiter Ascending. “Maybe in March we’ll see this year’s first good movie,” his pal said back, as if Girlhood, Hard to Be a God, Amira & Sam, Timbuktu, Joy of Man’s…
(Heavy spoilers for the pilot; very light spoilers for episodes 2 and 3.) There’s more than one way to start a revolution. You can get high off your own sense of righteousness and authenticity, as celebrity chef and Fresh Off the Boat memoirist Eddie Huang recently did by calling one…
Those more devoted to the genre can debate whether Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsman: The Secret Service is the best comic-book movie of the last few years. What’s beyond argument, however, is that Vaughn has whipped up the most interesting one — and the only one to make ferocious, unsettling art out…
Even fans of Fifty Shades of Grey admit the book is a literary atrocity. Novelist E.L. James’s erotic reveries read like the rantings of a drunk yokel — less “His firm hands cupped my breasts” and more “Holy crap! He’s touching my boobs!” The story is simple: Twenty-one-year-old virgin Anastasia…
Fifty Shades of Grey is opening is nationwide, and in New York, Village Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl connects via the magic of the Internet with LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson discuss the hotly anticipated movie starring Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson, adapted from the E. L. James novel…
There’s more than one way to start a revolution. You can get high off your own sense of righteousness and authenticity, as celebrity chef and Fresh Off the Boat memoirist Eddie Huang recently did by calling one of his Asian-American collaborators an “Uncle Chan” in the press. Or you can…
The Dardenne brothers, Luc and Jean-Pierre, are known to explore characters trapped by social and economic circumstance, challenging with curiosity and compassion the assumptions attached to the lives of less-fortunate others. With Two Days, One Night, the Dardennes turn their humanist lens onto someone in conflict with her own humanity:…
