Prison life is reliably repetitive, but conditions can be frighteningly unstable, too. Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black, which returned June 12 for its third season, reflects that paradoxical state of affairs by delivering more of the same — heartfelt but complicated relationships, inspired capers, compelling personalities, stomach-twisting flips in…
New York has often been the setting for films about heroin addicts, with titles ranging from Shirley Clarke’s cinéma-vérité-tweaking The Connection (1961) to Slava Tsukerman’s new-wave cult classic Liquid Sky (1982) mining the drama of smack freaks tying off, shooting up and nodding out. But Josh and Benny Safdie’s tough,…
In Jurassic World, Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic Park reboot — set 22 years after dinosaurs started walking the Earth, again — brontosauruses, stegosauruses and velociraptors have become old hat, sort of like the mechanical Abe Lincoln at Disneyland. Meanwhile, the habitat around them has gone Vegas: Isla Nublar, home of the…
Denver is an ideal place for outdoor movies; our normally cool, dry and clear evenings make for superb viewing. While the metro area once sported more than two dozen drive-ins, it’s now down to two: the 88 Drive-In Theatre and the Denver Mart Drive-In, which opens June 12. But there…
One of the funniest things in Live From New York!, the latest repackaging of Saturday Night Live history, comes from Amy Poehler, describing the institution that made her a star: “SNL — the show your parents used to have sex to that now you watch during the day.” Something almost…
In its last moments, Amy Berg’s exposé of sexual predators among Hollywood’s management classes offers a curious disclaimer: “The filmmakers acknowledge that this is not a gender based issue,” a title reads, just before the closing credits. “We chose to tell these specific stories, but they are representations of a…
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…
Twenty years back, 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: an alert immobility, shadowed and mostly…
The first line in Entourage is a good indication of what the next 104 minutes will bring. Peering through a pair of 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),…
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. “In L.A., people would say, ‘Oh, I was…
The Melissa McCarthy of Spy is different from the one who rose to prominence by shitting 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. But in the years since, Hollywood has continued to…
It’s appropriate that when the lights go down on Wednesday for the start of the thirtieth annual Chautauqua Silent Film Series, they’ll do so in an auditorium that’s been screening movies longer than any other venue in Colorado. On July 21, 1898, the Chautauqua Auditorium hosted a traveling exhibitor displaying…
To try to explain an Everything Is Terrible! show is to try to describe the most haunting fever dream that has ever rolled through your brain: It’s like the terror of sleep paralysis, but with a weird comedy aftertaste. The artists behind EIT!, led by the mysterious shadow figure of…
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, 1966’s Pet Sounds — all bets are off when it comes to the way ordinary aural…
Maybe we contain multitudes, and maybe we contain a couple great splashes of primary color. With one arm stretched high above his head, puppeteer Caroll Spinney has spent the last decades embodying the warmest of yellows and grimiest of greens, playing — in every sense of the word — Sesame…
In the decadent 21st century, the summer movie season now sprawls from March through December. (Star Wars: Episode VII is due to awaken the Force December 18; every prior Star Wars picture has come out Memorial Day weekend.) But I’ll stick to tradition and call Memorial Day the start of…
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 twelve of him to spring into action — although, as Brad Peyton’s San Andreas warns, that still won’t be…
A movie about bringing down drug lords that’s actually mostly about movies, Cédric Jimenez’s The Connection is stretched over driven-cop beats so familiar that 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.) It’s…
“This is the oldest skull I have,” the Swiss artist H.R. Giger says, showing off this prized possession the breezy way you might a set of Fiestaware. He lifts the skull and regards it. But then his speech is breathy and halting, tender with age, as he elaborates: His father…
The final episode of Mad Men was upbeat — if you enjoy the death of the counter-culture. On this special episode of the Voice Film Club podcast, Village Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl and editorial fellow Lara Zarum, along with the Voice’s TV critic Inkoo Kang, discuss the final episode…
In a junk-food summer, Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland is a defiant carrot stick, a blockbuster adventure flick where the message is “Think smart.” It’s a deliberate phooey to the kiddie carnage of movies like Transformers and The Avengers, which frighten children about the apocalypse before they can even spell the word…
Fictional movies that tackle topical subjects often have about them the fusty air of a civics lesson, as if we’re supposed to watch pretending that we’re not being led down the path of righteousness. But writer-director Andrew Niccol’s Good Kill is something else; it’s immediate and vital, and it doesn’t…
