“I’ve interviewed a lot of nasty characters over the years,” says a cheerful Errol Morris over lunch on a bright Los Angeles day.”I’m a connoisseur of bullshit.” He’s sampled some of the finest: Holocaust deniers; murderers swearing their innocence; a beauty queen who claims she only kidnapped and raped that…

Tucked into a pocket of his workout sweats, Steve Rogers — aka Captain America, the serum-enhanced Yankee Doodle Dynamo who’s spent the last six decades in deep freeze — keeps a notebook of cultural beats he’s missed: Star Wars, Marvin Gaye, Thai food. If only he’d added ’70s conspiracy thrillers…

Dystopian movies don’t have to make sense. As the audience, we’re obligated to sit down with our popcorn and soda and pretend that, yes, of course, in the future monkeys rule the earth, women can’t bear children, and Arnold Schwarzenegger is an everyday construction worker. It’s a mutual contract of…

Let’s start with the ending, the closing-credits disclaimer that insists that none of the lead actors in Lars von Trier’s two-part erotic epic Nymphomaniac filmed penetrative sex. If there is real sex in the movie, and it sure looks like there is, it must have been the duty of the…

Think adapting War and Peace is hard? Try adapting the race-car video game Need for Speed. Tolstoy’s 1,225-page behemoth has nothing on the Electronic Arts franchise’s irreconcilably complicated twenty-year, twenty-installment history: Sometimes cars are subject to physics; sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes they’re invulnerable; sometimes they break. Maybe you’re in London;…

Leave it to Wes Anderson to make a film about World War II without mentioning Germany. In The Grand Budapest Hotel, a wundercabinet set in the fictitious Eastern European republic of Zubrowka circa 1932, Anderson captures the collapse of a kingdom and the rise of a reich without so much…

In 1990, the same year that Kevin Costner released the massive global hit Dances with Wolves, a curious thing happened in France. The name Kevin became the country’s most popular for new babies, a Gaelic moniker edging out national stalwarts like Antoine and Jules. Imagine if everyone in America suddenly…

Congratulations, Detroit. In 1987, Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop cemented it as the most violent city in the world, an honor the Motor City resented for decades until its powers-that-be realized they may as well erect a statue of Peter Weller and milk the tourism. Twenty-seven years later, the attention has shifted…

Consider the Lego, the toy of contradiction. With one — well, with hundreds of them — you can build anything: houses, airplanes, house-airplanes. You can even build something that will change the world, as Larry Page and Sergey Brin did in 1996, when they housed the server for their new…

Baltimore’s 12 O’Clock Boys are a dirt-bike crew who literally believe in “ride or die.” If it weren’t for their Sundays in the streets causing havoc for the cops, boredom and stress would get them in worse trouble. And from what we see in Lotfy Nathan’s documentary, we believe it…

Quick, somebody check Jason Reitman’s house to see if the real man has been turned into dust by a body snatcher. Though his name’s on the poster, it’s impossible to believe that the sardonic boy wonder of Juno, Thank You for Smoking and Young Adult would direct a stilted romance…

Let’s start with the ending: the closing credits disclaimer that insists that none of the lead actors in Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac filmed penetrative sex. If there is real sex in the movie, and it sure looks like there is, it must have been done by one of the eight…

For Robert Redford, Sundance’s opening day was a bummer. He woke up to learn that the Academy had snubbed him for a (deserved) Best Actor nod for the sparse yachting drama All Is Lost, and had to spend his typically triumphant morning press conference swatting down questions about being sad…

You can say this for the Disney teen machine: They sure know how to pick ’em. Vanessa Hudgens was seventeen when High School Musical made her famous, the tail end of a generation of Mouseketeers that included her contemporaries Zac Efron, Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez, and her elders Justin…

The Sundance InstituteEvery Sundance there’s a crowd-pleaser, and most years it’s got one degree of separation from the Little Miss Sunshine crew. But the most delightful flick of the 2014 fest is an unconventional documentary with no plot, no dialogue, and nothing but party. Living Stars, a fleet 63-minute film…

Pamela Smart, the sexpot schoolteacher who seduced three teenage boys to shoot her husband, has been imprisoned without parole since 1991. Her official release year is sometime in 9999, assuming that human civilization is still alive. Yet the captive in Jeremiah Zagar’s Captivated: The Trials of Pamela Smart isn’t her…

© Courtesy of Sundance InstituteSixty years ago, Fred Flintstone hawked Winston cigarettes. Today, he pitches cereal. And both can kill. Stephanie Soechtig’s rabble-rousing documentary Fed Up argues that it’s time to attack Big Sugar just like we successfully demonized Big Tobacco. Narrated by Katie Couric, Fed Up is the first…

© Beth Dubber, Courtesy of Sundance InstituteKristen Stewart in Camp X-Ray.Kristen Stewart spent five Twilight films getting rescued by werewolves and vampires. Consider Camp X-Ray her rebuttal to a half-decade of playing damsels in distress. As Guantanamo guard Private Cole, Stewart is punched, bloodied, and spat on — and that’s…

The terrible reality of modern life is that even beautiful young people on a first date can’t go a whole evening without checking their phones. Just allowing the present to happen has become increasingly foreign. That’s the idea Spike Jonze is scratching at in his futuristic romance Her, in which…

James, By now, your buddies have forwarded you the Reddit Ask Me Anything where a 24-year-old man with Diphallia — aka two penises — says he wants to give you a facial. Say yes. Let’s get through the superficial reasons first. This magical male unicorn (er, two-nicorn?) is anonymous, which…

Three types of artists hinge on authenticity: punk bands, folk singers, and rappers. Actors, like Oscar Isaac, are by definition phonies. But the star of Joel and Ethan Coen’s new film, Inside Llewyn Davis, gets that pressure to keep it real. In high school, he was a straight-edge punk frontman…

When he was thirteen, Marilyn Manson — then just Christian schoolkid Brian Warner of Canton, Ohio — would hide out in the basement while his grandfather masturbated to bestiality porn. Then he’d go upstairs and cheer himself up reading Mad magazine. The self-dubbed God of Fuck is famous for his…