Despite the giddy, gory ridiculousness of Kick-Ass 2, this summer’s most violent yet least punishing comic-book movie, there’s a kernel of ugly human truth at its core. In the first issue of Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s Kick-Ass comic, from 2008, a lonely high-school twerp dons a wetsuit and…

Tilikum, the 12,000-pound bull orca whose big splashes still climax daily SeaWorld shows, has been implicated in three human deaths, spread over his three decades of forced performances: Two trainers, twenty years apart, and a drifter who in 1999 apparently hid in the park and dove into the wrong pool…

“I kept thinking she was the ugly duckling who was going to turn into a swan,” a fortyish loudmouth complained as the crowd trudged out of a preview screening of The To Do List. “But she was an ugly duckling all the way through!” He was talking to two women…

With an offhand precision that suggests he might prove to be one of his generation’s major actors, Michael Cera lays bare two specific human weaknesses in writer-director Sebastián Silva’s altered-states/group-dynamics road drama Crystal Fairy — weaknesses you’re likely to recognize from life rather than from other movies. The first is…

Like first sex, writer-director Maggie Carey’s debut feature, The To Do List, is quick and messy, fitfully pleasurable, full of promise, but not quite adept at getting everyone off. It’s an impossibly huge deal, yet also a modest achievement, something we have to go through that will no doubt be…

Something like half the running time of the engaging new don’t-go-in-the-basement thriller The Conjuring is devoted to showing us characters proceeding slowly into the basement, or into the maws of basement-like places we know they shouldn’t go, often with just matches or a flashlight to guide them. Twice, deliciously, they’re…

Among the revelations you’re likely to experience during the course of Gideon’s Army, Dawn Porter’s vital, moving new HBO documentary (premiering July 1) about the struggle of conscience waged by public defenders in the deep South: “Everyone is so young.” Not just the suspects — mostly black and mostly broke…

Surprising proof that Hollywood still can craft a memorable studio comedy — even if it doesn’t realize that itself — Roland Emmerich’s White House Down stands as a singular achievement in parody, its auteur’s intentions be damned. It’s not just a pitch-perfect attack on every risible plot point afflicting today’s…

Sometimes, there’s just too damn much to say about a movie than can fit into any one review. (Even Stephanie Zacharek’s exhaustive, excellent one.) So here’s more: Stephanie Zacharek, our lead film critic, and film editor Alan Scherstuhl hashing over all the portentous craziness in Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel…

From the peak of Anchorman to the nadir of Burt Wonderstone, the formula for studio comedies of the past twenty years has been simple: Dude acts like a dick for an hour, turns blandly sweet toward the end, and then everyone on the DVD commentary can claim to have made…

George R. R. Martin took a break from killing Starks today to send us this list of the notes he would send to the producers of TV shows if he were put in charge of them. Here’s what he dashed off for us, in between shouting descriptions of imaginary feasts…

The surprise twist in the new M. Night Shyamalan film is that the film is directed by M. Night Shyamalan, a fact that the movie—like the posters and commercials—won’t admit until after you’ve already sat through it. While at heart a Pinkett-Smith family bonding project, the kind of sci-fi play…

“Least you got to see a motherfucker crucify himself,” Richard Pryor spits in the most surprising footage director Marina Zenovich has unearthed for her new documentary Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic. The scene is of Pryor’s last great cock-up, just before his last, great comeback. Pacing restlessly before a Hollywood…

Seemingly crafted to validate the fears of those conservatives who rage that the white man can’t get respect on the big screen these days, the smart-till-it-isn’t thriller Black Rock centers on a tense scene of hero-pantsing and gender inversion. The piece-of-shit bad guys, a couple of vets of our desert…

To: Stephanie Zacharek From: Alan Scherstuhl Hi, Stephanie, welcome again to the Voice! Like you, I found myself worn out by Iron Man 3, especially the long, kabooming climax. And, like you, I found myself wishing that Robert Downey Jr. had something deeper to play, and that the character had…

At any prior point in TV history, Rectify, a six-part drama on the Sundance channel, would be a shake-up-the-medium astonishment: A sober, even stately investigation into a curious kind of afterlife, that of a death-row inmate given freedom twenty years after his conviction. For all the finely crafted mysteries of…

Half a year later, now on Blu-ray and DVD, Django Unchained is still kicking up shit, this time via cross-media trickle-down. TV’s LL Cool J, not long before declaring Confederate flag apparel A-OK with him, dared to express in “Accidental Racist” one hard-edged complaint about the life of a black…

The good news: Here’s a lavish, serious science-fiction picture, one that on occasion transcends big-budget hitmaking convention to glance against grandeur. Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion, based on his own graphic novel, is one of those futuristic puzzlers whose dramatic energies are most invested not in the characters or their fates, exactly,…

A likable hagiography as nuanced as a plaque at the Baseball Hall of Fame, Brian Helgeland’s Jackie Robinson bio 42 finds a politic solution to the challenge Quentin Tarantino faced last year with Django Unchained: how to craft a crowd-pleasing multiplex period piece whose villain is, essentially, “all white people.”…

They do move in herds,” Sam Neill marvels, purportedly gazing at his director’s miracle dinosaurs but in reality directing his wonderment right into the camera — and right out at us, the viewers whose herdability made such smash successes of Jurassic Parks one and two. (Our failure to turn out…

What must Bruce Willis have felt when he discovered that his seven or so minutes of G.I. Joe: Retaliation screen time offer much more agreeable Bruce Willis-ness than the entirety of A Good Day to Die Hard? Or that his cameo, shot two years back and rich with quips and…

Again and again, movies show you killing, but it’s one in a thousand on-screen killings that might get you to feel something of what killing is actually like. The same goes for fucking, but there the numbers are worse: Whether it’s Hollywood’s quick-cut, nothing-below-the-waist bedroom montages, or the mechanized chug…