We may not need another hero, but true believers don’t need to shrink-ray their expectations. Ant-Man is the first Marvel film — and the first of this summer’s pixels-go-kablooey time-wasters — to get better as it goes. The filmmakers save their biggest, wiggiest ideas for the climaxes, where they wittily…
While Judd Apatow and Amy Schumer’s new movie Trainwreck is “occasionally very funny, it also feels carefully constructed to make its points, chief among them that men can get away with all kinds of bad or crazy behavior that women can’t,” writes Village Voice film critic Stephanie Zacharek in her review…
Does gay have a particular sound? Is there a certain way that gay men speak that our brains read as a dead giveaway to their sexual orientation? The new film Do I Sound Gay?, opening Friday at the Mayan Theatre, explores the myth and science behind the queer dialect ,…
Above all else, a movie built around a star promises presence, and in Bill Condon’s Mr. Holmes, that promise is dual: Here’s 100 or so minutes with the great Ian McKellen, for once not casting spells, controlling magnetism or classing up script pages of expositional gobbledygook. Besides that, Mr. Holmes…
The problem with clamoring for more woman-led comedies is that actual comedy may be the thing that ends up being left by the wayside. Tina Fey, among others, has railed against the boneheaded dictum that women can’t be funny. But in the current climate of watchfulness — one in which…
Dr. Jeffrey Young is a casting director’s dream. There’s the veterinarian’s look: long, greying hair, a thick mustache and kanji tattoos inked on his biceps, sculpted from years working as a track-and-field coach at North High. Then there’s the fact that, a quarter-century into his practice, Young still isn’t shy…
Imagine if Donald Trump wanted to reboot his disastrous presidential-campaign-announcement month to start over as a younger man with real hair. In Tarsem Singh’s Self/less, Trump could hire the medical geniuses of Phoenix Biogenic to transfer his aging brain into a strapping-hot bod for $250 million — the price of…
The death of Amy Winehouse, in July 2011, at age 27, was one of the first great tragedies of 21st-century pop music, an event — like the deaths of Tupac Shakur and Kurt Cobain in the last decade of the twentieth — that emphasized the jarring contrast between the fragility…
Dana Nachman’s Batkid Begins marches in with the mini-movie you’ve already seen. (Unless, as Bruce Wayne suffered in The Dark Knight Rises, you’ve spent months in a hole.) On a November weekday in San Francisco — a/k/a Gotham-by-the-Bay — five-year-old cancer survivor Miles Scott rode shotgun in a Lamborghini Batmobile,…
Hollywood lives by the simple, sad axiom “Where there’s money, there’s more money,” which is how we get remakes of movies that sometimes shouldn’t have been made in the first place, two Spider-Man reboots within five years, and a Star Wars franchise that ensures our children’s children will revere George…
There’s no one right way to show mental illness in the movies, yet there are hundreds of ways to get it wrong. Even though certain disorders come with specific traits, a diagnosis is not a human being, and doomed is the actor who just cycles through symptoms rather than working…
After many high note-saturated years, the long-in-the-tooth American Idol will sign off after this upcoming fifteenth season (premiering in January 2016). But if your dreams of being America’s next golden throat are still red-hot, fear not: AI will kick off auditions for its epic swan song this Friday in Denver, so pour…
Emily Griffith’s story deserved a happier ending. After giving so much to so many — she founded the first free adult-learning institution in the country, the Opportunity School — she retired in 1933 and moved to a cabin up in the mountains. And there the founder of the Emily Griffith…
The upcoming Amy Winehouse documentary Amy is one of the best music docs Village Voice film critic Stephanie Zacharek has ever seen, and she explains why to Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl and LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson this week. Also this week: The confusing (yet really, really enjoyable) explanations…
Perhaps a side effect of Denver’s recent development boom and expansion is that this city may have just become an easy mark for reality television — at least judging from the sudden rash of audition opportunities headed our way. Big Brother, The Bachelor, Jeopardy and Wheel Of Fortune all came…
Five films into the franchise, Terminator: Genisys feels like a VHS cassette that’s been rewound and recorded over for 21 years. Director Alan Taylor (of the unmemorable Thor: The Dark World) gives us images — a thumbs-up, an abandoned factory, a liquid-metal cop smashing through the windshield of a car…
Steven Soderbergh’s 2012 Magic Mike was a tease. The ads tempted audiences with sweaty chests and thrusting crotches, but after Soderbergh lured us into his all-male strip club, he turned on the lights to show us the squalor. His hunks were drugged and morally decayed. The women — the sober…
Despite an evening rain shower, folks of all ages had a roaring good time Tuesday night at the Film on the Rocks screening of Jurassic World, complete with a pre-movie set by the School Of Rock All-Stars. Photographer Brandon Marshall brought back these images of all the prehistoric partying. Now see…
On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, the LA Weekly’s Amy Nicholson and the Village Voice’s Alan Scherstuhl in New York disagree on just about everything in Ted 2 — except that it has a few very funny moments — but only after revisiting the impressive Inside Out, which is nearly…
Some movies are indefensible, and Ted 2 is one of them. Not only is this a movie about a libidinous, foul-mouthed stuffed bear; it’s the sequel to an earlier movie about a libidinous, foul-mouthed stuffed bear. But I laughed and laughed at Ted 2 — as I did at the…
Even if you live in the same city or town your whole life, the place you came from is always a distant country: Old trees are cut down to be replaced, one hopes, by new ones; shops and businesses change ownership or, worse, are torn down; landmarked buildings may stay…
Denver horror film fans, rejoice! Theresa Mercado, your scream queen, is back on her deadly throne and she’s putting her Best of Denver award for Best Bloodthirsty Movie Host to good use by taking her scary Screen Scream series to the Sie FilmCenter, where it will kick off Thursday with a…
