“If everything were great, nothing would be great.” That line, from Scott Coffey’s smart and sweetly entertaining Adult World, is one of my favorite bits of movie dialogue this year, not least because it’s applicable to every movie genre — actually, every genre of everything. But in the movie world,…
Here are movie moments from 2014 I’ll never forget: Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s sad pop tart smacking her ass in Beyond the Lights, the sick room choked with flowers in Michel Gondry’s Mood Indigo, Oscar Isaac and Kirsten Dunst’s Greek-island all-nighter in The Two Faces of January, and the entire soundtrack of…
In Rupert Wyatt’s highball-cool reworking of Karel Reisz’s 1974 The Gambler, Mark Wahlberg does not play a cop, does not shoot bad guys with a gun, and does not spend considerable time shirtless (though we do see him sulking in a bathtub, and there’s a fleeting wet T-shirt moment, too)…
The waifs that Walter Keane made famous were known for their huge peepers. But look down at their mouths: Every one kept its lips pressed tight, as though to prevent a secret from escaping. That’s where you see the real artist: Walter’s shy wife, Margaret (Amy Adams),who bitterly allowed her…
Ann Hamilton and Jae Ko et al. For Ann Hamilton: Selected Works, the initial enfilade of spaces at Robischon Gallery is taken over by works on paper by this noted conceptualist. The first group is from her “visite” series, the name of which is taken from the term “carte de…
There’s something curiously airless about director Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken, the story of real-life Olympian and WWII P.O.W. Louis Zamperini. Early on, Louis (Jack O’Connell) and his fellow American soldiers are zipping through the golden skies, dogfighting with Japanese planes — and even though the B-24’s doors are open and the…
Before worrying ourselves over its qualities as an adaptation or its findings as an experiment in just how much tumpety-tump parump-pa-bump the human mind can endure, let’s take a moment to marvel that Rob Marshall’s Into the Woods even exists — as a PG from Disney, no less! No matter…
“Politics really isn’t my specialty,” shrugs Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) to a naval commander (Charles Dance) in an early job-interview scene in Morten Tyldum’s choppy biopic The Imitation Game. Yet no less than Winston Churchill would credit Turing as the main cause of the Allies’ victory over the Nazis. Turing…
It’s judgment day. Have you been naughty or have you been nice? It all comes down that. But while you won’t find out if you get the new iPad or a lump of coal for a few days, it won’t hurt to pay homage to the ultimate holiday hero. Bake…
Village Voice film critic Stephanie Zacharek and LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson run down their ten favorite/best/top/whatever movies of 2014, along with Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl. Send barbs, jabs, claims or jokes to filmpod@villagevoice.com and follow us on the Twitter at @voicefilmclub. [Subscribe to the Voice Film Club…
We begin this week’s Voice Film Club podcast with a strange story about Giles Corey, who famously said, “More weight!” as stones were laid upon him during his witch trial. The end of the year is sort of like that for film critics, who are pressed upon with all the…
What kind of circle is time again? A year after blowing the doors off our annual critics’ poll, golden boy Matthew McConaughey won just a single vote for his turn in the loudest movie of the year, Christopher Nolan’s tears-in-space effort Interstellar, which has tied with the unprescient Transcendence as…
The funniest and most incisive show on television is ending this week — so let’s look back at how it began. On October 17, 2005, a power-suited Stephen Colbert furrowed his eyebrows and showed off highlights of his new set. Red letters above him shouted, “The Colbert Report.” The title…
Sony assumed that North Korea would hate the movie. The question was: What would it do? Pyongyang had just tested its atom bomb and threatened “preemptive nuclear attack.” And the Supreme Leader with his finger on the trigger was barely over thirty, with less than two years of experience. But…
The biggest laugh I heard from the audience at my screening of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies came from seven words in the end credits: “Based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien.” Just picture that tweedy Oxford philologist nodding in pleased approval at this adaptation of his…
If we’re honest, most of us who relish a good horror film don’t actually hope to feel something like horror. Instead, the appeal is that of shock and surprise, all candied up, the crowd-pleasing bits staged with the kind of extended setup/payoff patience that the makers of comedies have long…
Quick: Name the most expensive housing market in America. If you said New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco, you couldn’t be farther from the truth — literally. Each is more than 1,500 miles away from Williston, North Dakota. In four years, the population has doubled as newcomers gold-rush to…
Ann Hamilton and Jae Ko et al. For Ann Hamilton: Selected Works, the initial enfilade of spaces at Robischon Gallery is taken over by works on paper by this noted conceptualist. The first group is from her “visite” series, the name of which is taken from the term “carte de…
Editor’s Note: Sony has officially canceled the theatrical release of The Interview following terrorist threats against theaters and the announcement that several major theater chains had opted not to exhibit the film. The following review was written before Sony pulled The Interview– and stands as a reminder that world-shaking art…
TV continued to unmoor from its origins and transform into something else this year. No longer tethered to a specific appliance, a particular kind of storytelling, or even commercial concerns, “television” now feels like an increasingly obsolete word. But that’s a discussion for another time, for we’ve come to celebrate…
The world of film has its auteurs and icons, and loyal viewers will line up to see a movie based on a director’s name alone. But the name of Mike Nichols guaranteed a film experience above almost all others, with a script that was top-notch and impeccable acting. Nichols had…
Christmas is a shared experience around many parts of the world. There are different traditions and celebrations, but whether it’s Joyeux Noël or Meri Kurisumasu, Christmas has central themes that we can relate to wherever we are. This year, put away the tired classics and opt for something with a…
