Stephanie Zacharek is the new chief film critic at the Village Voice. Alan Scherstuhl is the Voice’s film editor. Sometimes they gab about how the review-sausage gets made. To: Stephanie Zacharek From: Alan Scherstuhl Hi, Stephanie, welcome again to the Voice! Like you, I found myself worn out by Iron…
In Mud, McConaughey Is Great Again
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…
Tom Cruise’s Oblivion Is Grand Until It’s Not
Theory: The Shining is about the genocide of Native Americans. Evidence: The Overlook Hotel’s Navajo décor; Calumet baking powder cans (logo: an Indian chief) appear at moments when characters are “making treaties”; Nicholson’s Jack Torrance asks a phantom bartender to commiserate about “the white man’s burden”; the Overlook is built…
42 Almost Makes a Flesh-and-Blood Man of Its Hero
Jurassic Park 3D Review: Spielberg Still Thrills
Like the blood that gushes from the elevators of the Overlook Hotel, brilliant/ridiculous theories of what Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is really about have for years surged madly and memorably — especially online, where the Internet’s dead ends, blind links, and circular arguments just might be another part of the…
The Host Movie Review: If You Must See This Movie, Please Bring a Young Man With You
G.I. Joe: Retaliation Review: Dumb as Catbutt but Still Fun
Wrong Movie Review: Amusingly Aimless
Five Awesome/Crazy Theories About The Shining From Room 237
Elisabeth Moss’s face is far from the only reason to savor Top of the Lake, Jane Campion’s smart, bracing, hugely enjoyable mystery rural noir Top of the Lake, which premieres on the Sundance Channel on Monday, March 18. But that pale-to-radiant instrument of hers — a mouth that suggests her…
The Incredible Burt Wonderstone Review: Vanishes the Thing Steve Carell Is Best At
Twenty minutes into the first full-length movie based on L. Frank Baum’s most beloved novel, a duck pukes into the face of Larry Semon, the star and director. Semon’s 1925 flop, titled The Wizard of Oz, opens and closes with a Geppetto-esque toymaker reading to his granddaughter from a well-loved…
West of Memphis Movie Review: A New Doc Frees the West Memphis Three
Before anything else, here’s how dumb things get in A Good Day to Die Hard, which is being sold as a bang-bang movie sequel so that nobody catches onto its true nature: a black-ops experiment testing the human faculty for discovering coherent patterns in unrelated shards of image. Late in…
Beautiful Creatures: The Ravishing Chastity Fantasy
Beautiful Creatures Movie Review: The Ravishing Chastity Fantasy
Identity Thief Movie Review: Creators Fear What Audiences Love About Melissa McCarthy
Stand Up Guys Movie Review: A Blow to Al Pacino’s Legacy
Hyde Park on Hudson Review: It’s Patriotic to Pleasure a President
