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…
There’s no reverie Alonso Ruizpalacios’ Güeros can’t shatter, no presumed truth it can’t complicate, no expectation of closure it won’t dash. Set in Mexico City during 1999’s 292-day student strike at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, the film is about — if any one thing — proximity to decisiveness,…
Above all else, a movie built around a star promises presence, and in Bill Condon’s Mr. Holmes, that promise is dual: Here are 104 minutes with the great Ian McKellen, for once not casting spells, controlling magnetism, or classing up script pages of expositional gobbledygook. It’s not his job, this…
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…
If you were to hear there’s a new street-crime revenge thriller that pairs a grown-up recent Oscar nominee/beloved TV star with Jennifer Lopez, you would probably respond, “This must be January” and “Even if it’s terrible, that movie will make serious money.” But the lead this time is not Liam…
Imagine 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…
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…
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 20th — that emphasized the jarring contrast between the fragility…
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…
Crystal Moselle’s documentary The Wolfpack is a Manhattan fable about fear. Two decades ago, a Hare Krishna, conspiracy theorist, and self-described god named Oscar Angulo moved from Peru to a public housing tenement on the Lower East Side with his American bride, Susanne, whom he’d met and wooed on the…
After twelve years on the air, The Daily Show With Jon Stewart became required viewing during the Dubya years, when much of the nation was desperate to look to almost anyone else for political leadership. The Comedy Central series offered nightly catharsis in five- or eight-minute bursts, voicing the anger…
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)…
On Saturday, June 27, in a dark room with flashing lights and funk-laden instrumental tunes, on a round stage about 30 feet in diameter, 16 of the best b-boys in America threw down their gauntlets — or sweaty beanie caps — for the Red Bull BC One, a 12-year-old international…
Enter a room created by Leah Brown and you feel as if you have been swept away into a surrealistic realm where you’ll want to stay for a long while. The Fort Lauderdale-based artist has keenly pulled off a dream world in her first solo museum show, “Transformation of Echo:…
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 cocktease. The ads tempted audiences with sweaty chests and thrusting crotches, but after Soderbergh lured us in to 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…
World cinema may have no better builder of delightful scenes than Roy Andersson, the deadpan Swedish existentialist. Each shot in an Andersson film is part diorama, part theatrical performance, part moviemaking the way Thomas Edison did it: Build a set, plant a camera, and stage highly orchestrated comedy and tragedy…
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…
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…
A decade ago, Edouard Duval-Carrie gathered a group of Broward high schoolers to talk about Haiti. The artist, who was born in Haiti, wanted to find out what the kids knew about his homeland. “I worked with 20 or 30 kids,” he recalls, “a lot of them Haitian and a…
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl may not be the best teen cancer weepie ever made, if there even is a best teen cancer weepie. But it’s surely the most adorable, for better or worse — less like The Fault in Our Stars and more like Diary of a…
One of the nastiest tricks the bastards ever played was to convince so many artists that it’s best never to be strident. In the name of aesthetics or audience-pleasing or just not wanting to come off as shrill, a great many artists deny themselves — and their art — both…
