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…
Even with hundreds of rock documentaries covering everything from concerts to artists on tour, few have managed to crystalize the creative process as well as 20,000 Days on Earth. Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s fantastical depiction of Nick Cave’s 20,000 days explodes the rules of traditional documentary filmmaking. They have…
When it comes to the immigration debate, all too often people get swept up in political generalities and forget the people, says Kristy King, programmer for the Emily Griffith Film Festival, which runs Friday, October 10 through Sunday, October 12 at the SIE FilmCenter. “We really tried to focus on…
Remakes are always dicey business, and horror remakes seem to be especially awful, despite — or perhaps because of — their ubiquity. Still, not every horror film remake is a total shit show. Every once in a while, one manages not to embarrass itself — or even the film being…
Karen Yasinsky is not afraid to test her audience’s patience. Often, she animates slight variations of one shot and leaves the viewer with that single image for minutes on end. Her films are quiet, and in their stillness and subtlety, they are a violent rupture from the speed, aggression and…
Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice, along with LA Weekly’s Amy Nicholson, talk about one of the big movies of the year, Gone Girl, which opens in about 3,000 U.S. theaters on Friday, but the trio also makes room for lesser-known films like The Blue Room, Men,…
The best scary movies are not necessarily the ones with superb acting or cutting-edge special effects. You don’t need Alfred Hitchcock or Wes Craven — or even a big budget — to get scared silly. The best scary movies are sometimes strange and sometimes campy, with a dark sense of…
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…
Everything about Gone Girl, David Fincher’s adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s enormously popular 2012 thriller about a deteriorating marriage and a wife gone missing, is precise and thoughtful; it’s as well planned as the perfect murder, with its share of vicious, shivery delights. But at the end of the perfect murder,…
Should we trust artists to tell the story of artists? On the plus side, who understands them better? If there’s a secret language of imagination and creativity, then the members of this sprawling tribe must be the ones who speak it best. On the other hand, could there be anything…
