Mean and vigorous men’s-adventure pulp throwback No Escape has everything going against it. It’s a late-August release whose leads, Owen Wilson and Lake Bell, tend to be the best things in movies you otherwise regret seeing. The trailers, teasing the story of a toothsome American family hunted by peasant rebels…
Thirty years ago, filmmaker John Hughes got the attention of a generation when he introduced us to the detention crew at Shermer High School, who start out socially separated strangers and end up thick as thieves as they work through their problems, differences and similarities during one extended day. Making…
What happens when the pioneers of a movement get left out of history? The Damned: Don’t You Wish That We Were Dead, screening August 24 at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, explores that very question. The documentary takes an in-depth look at The Damned, one of the punk era’s most influential yet…
On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast: We love Guy Ritchie’s stylish, charming The Man From U.N.C.L.E., while LA Weekly film critic Amy states her case for American Ultra. We move onto Lily Tomlin’s memorable performance in Grandma. Later, Village Voice film editor Alan recommends Evil Knievel doc Being Evel, cutting indie…
“You could make five different N.W.A movies. We made the one we wanted to make.” That’s director F. Gary Gray during an audience Q&A after a recent screening of Straight Outta Compton, the long-awaited N.W.A movie. In our review, Amy Nicholson writes that there’s much more to the group’s story:…
Is it in honor of its subject that the high-flying doc Being Evel indulges so often in hilarious overstatement? “He opened the door and invited people to buy a ticket to watch truth,” one talking head insists, somehow keeping his face straight. Another speaks of how in the early 1970s…
Nima Nourizadeh’s American Ultra is a bloody valentine attached to a bomb. It’s violent, brash, inventive and horrific, and perhaps the most romantic film of the year. Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart star as Mike and Phoebe, two West Virginia stoners blissed out on weed and each other. “We’re the…
Hank Troy is taken aback. It’s just been pointed out to him that he’s created musical accompaniment for silent films a decade longer than the Silent Era itself lasted. “Hmm, I never thought about that,” says the gentle, friendly musician. “I’m going to have to think about that one!” Tonight, Troy…
In a world gone mad for superhero movies, what chance does the light spy caper have? When a whole city can be blasted to smithereens thanks to special effects, a picture that’s actually shot in Rome doesn’t hold a candle. Are modern audiences ready for the stylish, artfully ridiculous delights…
The runaway success of RuPaul’s Drag Race has put the spotlight on the subculture of drag queens, introducing the world to dozens of talented performers who have battled it out for seven seasons for the honor of being crowned the “next drag superstar.” Many of these personalities have crossed Denver…
Chances are good that you don’t know the works of writer/director/actor Xavier Dolan — and that is a crying shame. Dolan is Quebec’s wunderkind of cinema who, since turning nineteen, has put out five amazing pieces of film that show the practice, originality and power of someone much older and…
Even if you’re the sort who believes there can be no such thing as too much political coverage, it can’t hurt to cast a fond glance back to 1968, when only three networks — NBC, CBS, and the perennial laggard ABC — jockeyed for the attention of the American public…
Promising and disappointing all at once, Jon Watts’s backroads thriller Cop Car heralds the arrival of a significant director, one adept not just at the usual action and suspense but also at the fleet, affecting depiction of lives as they’re actually lived. In the opening scenes, the camera glides alongside…
“This conversation is the best one I ever had,” David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) says as The End of the Tour wraps up, and the movie, a pleasantly talky chamber piece, gives us welcome bursts of conversations. That long chat, with a David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel) abashed by the success…
There’s steady, scary thrill in the final third of Meru, the latest attempt to conquer the climb-and-tweak-the-nose-of-God mountaineering documentary, a genre that has yet to reach its apex. The terrible beauty of the Shark’s Fin point of northern India’s Mount Meru is enough to make this worth seeking out on…
In the holy trinity of N.W.A., each icon had a power: Dr. Dre produced, Ice Cube wrote the words, and Eazy-E was the comic relief. N.W.A.’s biopic, Straight Outta Compton, blurs those roles. Both Dre and Cube produced the film, and seem to have edited the script with a red…
Sharks are awesome. They’re the scariest real-world monsters out there — even for people like us, who live in a landlocked state. Thanks to their charming personalities and dashing good looks —all teeth and soulless eyes and hunger — sharks make for great movie and TV stars, a truth apparent…
The Sie FilmCenter is turning back the clock and slapping on some jangly spurs to bring you Westerns: The Golden Age, a long-in-the-works series that will celebrate that most dusty of genres, the Western. From August 13 to 16, Sie will present not only some of the staples you must…
During this week’s meeting of the Voice Film Club, Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice, along with Amy Nicholson of the LA Weekly, discuss the Marlon Brando documentary Listen to Me Marlon. Our trio of film critics then move to The End of the Tour, the film…
Jason Segel didn’t tell his book club he’d been cast as novelist David Foster Wallace in James Ponsoldt’s biopic The End of the Tour. “I didn’t want to sound like Fancy Pants McGee,” admits Segel over lunch in Los Angeles. (Especially since the 6-foot-4-inch comedy actor is famous for dropping…
Jonathan Demme’s rock-and-roll dramedy Ricki and the Flash exists in a wormhole where the last five decades of pop culture are a blur. There’s 66-year-old Meryl Streep, playing a broke singer who ditched her family to dominate the stage with the whiskey growl of Janis Joplin, the jangly jewelry and…
Sometime in the 1980s, Marlon Brando had his face digitized, presumably as a way of leaving just a bit more of himself after his departure from this planet. As we see it in Stevan Riley’s documentary Listen to Me Marlon, that speaking, moving hologram looks like a cross between George…
