Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice, along with LA Weekly’s Amy Nicholson, talk about one of the big movies of the year, Gone Girl, which opens in about 3,000 U.S. theaters on Friday, but the trio also makes room for lesser-known films like The Blue Room, Men,…
The best scary movies are not necessarily the ones with superb acting or cutting-edge special effects. You don’t need Alfred Hitchcock or Wes Craven — or even a big budget — to get scared silly. The best scary movies are sometimes strange and sometimes campy, with a dark sense of…
Far North & Outer Space. Far North & Outer Space, now at Goodwin Fine Art, features new work by Beau Carey and Lanny DeVuono, both of whom create contemporary paintings based obliquely on views of the landscape. Many of the Careys are snow scenes and were inspired by a National…
Everything about Gone Girl, David Fincher’s adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s enormously popular 2012 thriller about a deteriorating marriage and a wife gone missing, is precise and thoughtful; it’s as well planned as the perfect murder, with its share of vicious, shivery delights. But at the end of the perfect murder,…
Should we trust artists to tell the story of artists? On the plus side, who understands them better? If there’s a secret language of imagination and creativity, then the members of this sprawling tribe must be the ones who speak it best. On the other hand, could there be anything…
Vital, illuminating, and terrifying, Rory Kennedy’s Last Days in Vietnam probes with clarity and thoroughness one moment of recent American history that has too long gone unreckoned with. Here, in then-contemporary news footage and startlingly frank latter-day interviews, is the wrenching story of how it came to be that in…
In one Nick Cave song, a pedophiliac outlaw caps a murder spree by killing the devil himself. In another, the narrator muses on Miley Cyrus while seeking the “God particle” down a boulevard lined with burning trees. Cave is fluent in apocalyptic imagery and the Bible; his songs are filled…
Every child who’s thrown a tantrum, packed a bag and plotted to run away has shivered with the same vengeful thought: I wish I could see how sad they’ll be when I’m gone. The Left Behind franchise implies that evangelicals haven’t grown up. This new film version, the latest in…
Annabelle, an effective prequel to horror pastiche The Conjuring, surpasses its predecessor simply by virtue of occasionally being scary. Both films are overreliant on deafening sound effects and sideeye glimpses of underwhelming ghosts. But Annabelle’s scare scenes are better paced and more thoughtfully lensed. Its hokey, funhouseworthy spooks a…
Some say October is the month when the veil between the dead and the living vanishes. For movie lovers, this is no rare thing: We’re used to the shadows of the past flickering before our eyes and yesterday’s voices flooding our ears. And not just in horror films; after all,…
As Bob McCall in The Equalizer, Denzel Washington plays a regular Joe who turns into an eye-gouging, brain-drilling nightmare for Boston’s Russian mob. At first Washington “toodles about a Home Depot-like store, helping customers, decked out in New Balance shoes and jeans so last-century you’ll be looking for pleats,” writes…
It’s the kind of forward-thinking experience David Bowie himself might have predicted. Just for one day, on silver screens across the country, a movie about a museum exhibition — featuring a rocker’s groundbreaking albums, outlandish costumes, and clips from his artistic videos — will briefly tantalize the world…and then be…
Surprisingly moving for a film assembled from such familiar scenes, Craig Johnson’s The Skeleton Twins mushes together queasy/quirky indie family drama and the beats of a romantic comedy. You know the outline just from eyeballing the poster: Kristen Wiig’s Maggie and Bill Hader’s Milo find their way toward loving each…
The Boxtrolls is a kiddie charmer that makes you laugh, cower, and think of Hitler. That’s an unusual trifecta, but then again, this is an unusual film. If the German expressionists had been skilled at stop-motion animation, they’d have already made it. This is cartoon Caligari, a fable set on…
Terry Gilliam is a gifted, ambitious filmmaker who, sadly, may now be more famous for being misunderstood and underfunded than he is for actually making movies. The Zero Theorem isn’t likely to reverse that equation. In this half-squirrelly, half-torpid sci-fi adventure, Christoph Waltz, with a shaved head and a face…
Far North & Outer Space. Far North & Outer Space, now at Goodwin Fine Art, features new work by Beau Carey and Lanny DeVuono, both of whom create contemporary paintings based obliquely on views of the landscape. Many of the Careys are snow scenes and were inspired by a National…
“Groupie” has come to be an ugly word, a misogynist dig that’s used all too casually by men and women alike. A groupie is a woman who doesn’t “do” anything; she gets all of her glamour via her association with a strong man, most often a rock star. How can…
Before its regular-joe hero gets bitten by a radioactive equation and becomes the Equalizer, who’s sort of the Rain Man of puncturing Russian mobsters’ windpipes with corkscrews, Antoine Fuqua’s eye-gouging, brain-drilling, crowd-pleasing latest gives you a reel or two to remember what movies felt like back when they were about…
Terry Gilliam is a gifted, ambitious filmmaker who, sadly, may now be more famous for being misunderstood and underfunded than he is for actually making movies. The Zero Theorem isn’t likely to reverse that equation. In this half-squirrely, half-torpid sci-fi adventure, Christoph Waltz, with a shaved head and a face…
Simon Pegg has always been more like a cartoon than a real boy. He’s one part Charlie Brown to two parts Tintin, a round-faced runt who can channel both childlike depression and old-fashioned cowlicked pluck. In Pegg’s new film, Hector and the Search for Happiness, director Peter Chelsom simply allows…
In 2010, The Social Network fictionalized the dramatic building-up and falling-out around Facebook’s founding. Four years later, the documentary Print the Legend, a Netflix original, needs no fictional filter. The filmmakers assume, rightly for the most part, that viewers will be invested in the origin story and power struggles at…
You might think the world of experimental film is actually filled with experiments. But the genre’s series of tropes are often beaten to death by one generation after another. Stan Brakhage’s hand-painted films, Bruce Conner’s found footage remixes and Kenneth Anger’s surrealist narratives have influenced generations of filmmakers, some of…
