Alex Gibney will be ready if the power grids fail. “We have a place in Maine now,” the director says. “We just installed solar panels. We can fish. We have water. With a little bit of Sterno, we’ll probably be OK.” After a long career dredging up the dark side…
A wiener dog is the perfect mascot for Todd Solondz’s films. Dachshunds are ridiculous, funny without trying, but that zero-dignity waddle belies a much fiercer purpose: to hunt and kill small prey. Solondz’s body of work, stretching from coming-of-age cringefest Welcome to the Dollhouse to his newest, Wiener-Dog, has the…
Sometimes a movie seems like it was more fun to make than it is to watch. Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates is one of those movies. Zac Efron and Adam DeVine are Dave and Mike Stangle, two troublemaking brothers with a knack for walking the tightrope of party-makers/breakers. With…
In a stark white room, four boys huddle on a mattress, addressing the camera. They’re athletic, the picture of youth and every Abercrombie & Fitch catalog. A blond boy says, “We want to thank Jane O’Brien Media for this opportunity,” and they all smile and wave. They’re about to take…
Let me tell you all the good things about Nicolas Winding Refn’s high-art, lowbrow horror film The Neon Demon before I tell you what I will not tolerate. After Drive, Refn seems obsessed with his idea of Los Angeles, one where there’s always a full moon, no traffic and everyone…
People made a stink about the walkouts during the Sundance premiere of music-video-and-advertising geniuses the Daniels’ first feature film, Swiss Army Man. It stars Daniel Radcliffe (Manny) as a farting, rotting corpse with superpowers and Paul Dano (Hank) as a sad-sack suicidal stalker trying to get home through a forest…
Let me tell you all the good things about Nicolas Winding Refn’s high-art, lowbrow horror film The Neon Demon before I tell you what I will not tolerate. After Drive, Refn seems obsessed with his idea of Los Angeles, one where there’s always a full moon, no traffic and everyone…
When commercials for Mel Brooks’ Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995) ran on Channel One at my high school, I was ready. Vampire movies had dominated the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, and at last a slapstick comedy was set to lampoon all that arty melodrama. High school me couldn’t…
Director Jake Paltrow (Young Ones, The Good Night) met Brian De Palma at a party. He’d had a few drinks and worked up the courage to talk to the legendary filmmaker, who turned out to be surprisingly open and kind. The next day, Paltrow got an email from the friend…
There’s something satisfying about hearing Tyler Perry, as mad scientist Baxter Stockman, say the words “Eliminate those turtles,” but it’s not quite novel enough to bring Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows up to street level and out of the sewers. Early on, giant squid-like brain Krang (Brad…
“Did I want to shoot comedies?” asks Brandon Trost, director of photography on two of this summer’s funniest films, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping and Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising. “It’s funny — not at all.” But then came MacGruber, Jorma Taccone’s 2010 SNL film.“The director wanted me because I wasn’t…
The guiding principle of Lewis Carroll’s classics Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass is that logic does not exist. You tumble down rabbit holes and into mirrors willy-nilly, and you try to survive, feeling what you feel, having fun when you can — oh, and try not to drown…
Richard Bridgland was given an impossible task: recreate 1970s Hollywood for Shane Black’s buddy conspiracy thriller The Nice Guys … in Atlanta. As a production designer, Bridgland’s had to make the Czech Republic look like 1930s rural North Carolina (Serena), New Orleans look like West Virginia (American Ultra) and a…
In Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising, the sequel to 2014’s old-people-vs.-frat-brothers comedy, Zac Efron takes off his shirt in nearly every scene he’s in. It’s a sight to behold — again and again and again, but a calculated effort, like most of this film, to appeal to the ladies. As surprising…
Ben Wheatley and Amy Jump’s microbudget black-and-white English Civil War mushroom-trip movie A Field in England (2013) squeezed a tense and bizarre story from just a few dudes wandering around in a field. The married couple and filmmaking team — Wheatley as director and Jump as writer — previously made…
If you thought the billionaire played by Steve Carell in Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher was eerie, please allow me to introduce you to the real John du Pont. A dangerous concoction of lonely and paranoid, du Pont was blessed with money and mobility and cursed with the kind of childhood that…
It’s easy to think, based on the marketing, that the first feature film from acclaimed comedy duo Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele will be a hundred minutes of an adorable kitten dressed in a do-rag and gold chain for easy laughs, but Keanu is so so much more than that…
Fairy tales were meant to be oral stories. Translating the tangents of old women in far-flung villages (whose chips on their shoulders about, say, their brother’s failed shipping business might inspire long asides about the shipping industry) into written texts doesn’t always make for the most linear, easy read. In…
All actors possess their own personal gateway into becoming a character. Some require deep memory mining (method). Others require lengthy conversations with the director about seemingly unrelated philosophical topics. And some just need a single physical characteristic around which they can develop a character’s entire being. Susan Sarandon is a…
What do you get when you make a superhero movie with a male lead but keep your female audience at the forefront in your decision-making? Apparently a box office hit. By now, you’ve probably heard about the wild success of the little superhero film that could: Deadpool. Nobody expected much…
In Karyn Kusama’s newest feature film, The Invitation, a group of old friends gathers in a secluded house in the Hollywood Hills, reuniting after two years of radio silence from their hosts. What follows is slow-burning suspense, testing belief systems and social niceties, under the guise of a dinner party…
