Jazz isn’t dead. Miraculously, there’s always a small but steady stream of young people who continue to fall in love with this most dazzling and elusive American genre, spending hours, days, and months running ribbons of scales and memorizing Charlie Parker solos in the hopes that some of the alto…
Jake Gyllenhaal is used to exhaustion. During his research for the LAPD drama End of Watch, he spent five months patrolling the streets with real-life police officers until 7 a.m. It was good preparation for his new movie Nightcrawler, a blistering portrait of a morally corrupt crime-scene videographer who works…
Knocking out the first-rate forgeries that fooled sixty American museums? That was a curiously mundane miracle, something for Mark Landis to do while watching TV. A frail and ascetic Mississippian who resembles Michael Stipe playing Truman Capote, Landis sketched and painted minor Currans, Averys, and Cassatts with one eye on…
It’s awards season and the hyped movies are starting to land in theaters. On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, we talk about Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, starring Michael Keaton, and Alex Ross Perry’s Listen Up Philip, and carve out some time to recommend Nothing Bad Can Happen and Glen…
Scouring flea markets, thrift stores and film archives, filmmaker Kelly Sears rescues bits and pieces of forgotten movies and reanimates old footage to explore new ideas. But unlike many found-footage filmmakers whose works are an exercise in nostalgia, Sears reinvents histories to reflect on the current crises facing our society…
For kids, there’s nothing better than Halloween. You get to fulfill your wildest fantasies, explore your darkest fears and get a bag of free candy. It’s a time before adulthood beats the magic and wonder out of you, a time when you can still believe there’s something more out there…
Many basements, attics, closets and garages harbor dusty boxes of Super 8 films, VHS tapes or even mini-DVs. These old home movies show long-forgotten birthday parties, trips to the amusement park, babies cuddled by now deceased grandparents, all flickering moments in time captured but rarely screened. The Center For Home…
A gloom hangs over writer-director David Ayer’s brutal war drama Fury that only the audience can see. It’s April 1945, and we know that in weeks the Nazis will surrender. The war is already over; Hitler just hasn’t admitted it. American sergeant Don “Wardaddy” Collier (Brad Pitt) suspects as much,…
The big news: In its first half, before it bottoms out with the rankest feel-goodery, Theodore Melfi’s too-familiar ain’t-he-irascible comedy-drama St. Vincent features scene after scene of Bill Murray actually trying to make you laugh. How long has it been? He plays Vincent, a drunk-driving Brooklynite whose look suggests that…
Far North & Outer Space. Far North & Outer Space, now at Goodwin Fine Art, features new work by Beau Carey and Lanny DeVuono, both of whom create contemporary paintings based obliquely on views of the landscape. Many of the Careys are snow scenes and were inspired by a National…
Writer-director Hong Khaou’s slow-moving feature debut, Lilting, examines grief’s isolating effects through the eyes of two subjects: Chinese-Cambodian immigrant Junn (Cheng Pei-pei), whose son, Kai, is killed shortly before moving her away from her London retirement home, and Richard (Ben Whishaw), the lover Kai was working up the courage to…
The tragedy of Jason Reitman’s Men, Women & Children is that it was released the year it was made. A snapshot of today’s cultural disconnection, in which Facebook, texting, World of Warcraft and streaming smut lure people away from dinner with their families, the film’s so current that its observations…
You can’t live in New York for more than ten days without meeting some truly dreadful people: couples who fret about having to choose between buying a summer home and having a second child, even as you’re struggling to pay your monthly rent; large groups of people getting together for…
With the news that Paul Feig is going to reboot Ghostbusters with an all-female cast, we wonder on this week’s Voice Film Club podcast what it would be like if they re-did another ’80s classic: Young Guns. We then move onto the latest Brad Pitt World War II movie, Fury,…
Kiowa Winans stands in the garage of her West Highland home, shaking a lifeless child. “This is our stuffed Quinn,” she says, clutching the little-girl-sized doll. She’s referring to Quinn Hunchar, the actress who, at the age of eight, played Emma in the cult film Ink. The movie was written…
Our review of this week’s Dracula Untold doesn’t inspire much hope: “This Dracula Begins-style sword-and-fangs curio plays like someone said, ‘What if we took a vampire flick but did a find-and-replace swapping out all that bare-neck sensuality for some video-game ass-kicking?'” But for every genre-entry failure, there are numerous other…
“Based on a true story” are the scariest words that can appear in a horror movie. While Freddie and Jason may haunt our nightmares, there are real monsters that walk among us. That’s why documentaries that tell true, terrifying tales can be more frightening than fiction. Here are our five…
God save us from old coots and the actors who play them. Is that a terrible thing to say? Actors, like the rest of us, grow old, and there aren’t a whole lot of good roles available to them. But do we really need to see Robert Duvall playing a…
The “Dracula Begins”-style sword-and-fangs curio Dracula Untold plays like someone said, “What if we took a vampire flick but did a find-and-replace, swapping out all that bare-neck sensuality for some video-game ass-kicking?” Or: “Remember what the Star Wars prequels did for Darth Vader? Let’s foist the same kind of tragic…
It says something about current global affairs that a movie set during the U.K. miners’ strike of the mid-1980s — an event that tore lives to shreds — is likely to make you feel better rather than worse about the world. Pride, directed by Matthew Warchus, is a fictionalized account…
It was a mystery that reporter Gary Webb would have jumped on: a man who’d made powerful enemies allegedly committing suicide with two gunshots to the head. The tragedy is that Webb was the deceased. Michael Cuesta’s earnest, ire-inducing Kill the Messenger is a David-and-Goliath story where truth is the…
Based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1964 novel, The Two Faces of January is by no means great art; it never explodes the way a slick tale of larceny, lust, and blackmail should. But Hossein Amini’s directorial debut — he wrote the bloodier, pulpier Ryan Gosling thriller Drive — is stewing and…
