Miami Dade College’s Miami International Film Festival is changing the rules for its competition and programming, and that could be good news for festival goers looking for quality cinema. The new rules are designed to attract bigger named filmmakers, but are also more inclusive for producers of short films, and…
The Melissa McCarthy of Spy is different from the one who rose to prominence by crapping in a sink. Bridesmaids scored her an Oscar nomination, and for the ceremony McCarthy donned a glamorous rose gown with a diamond collar and belt.
Tiller Russell’s The Seven Five lets the most corrupt (convicted) NYC cop of the ’80s tell his own story. He relishes the chance.
The first line in Entourage is a good indication of what the next 104 minutes will bring. Peering through binoculars while a speedboat carries him toward a yacht in the dazzling waters of Ibiza, Johnny Drama (Kevin Dillon), the big brother of megastar Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier), glimpses the bikini-clad babes who await him and informs us, “I may have to jerk it before I even get there!”
The closeup, ostensibly one of a filmmaker’s most valuable tools, is now so overused that it’s practically meaningless. Thanks to TV — and to our habit of watching big-screen movies on increasingly smaller ones — we’re now so used to seeing a shot of one actor talking, followed by a shot of another responding, ad nauseam, that this volley of visual dullness barely registers anymore.
Frédéric Auburtin’s absurdly hagiographic drama United Passions purports to tell the history of FIFA — the world’s governing institution for soccer — from its 1904 founding up until its announcement of South Africa as the host country for the 2010 World Cup.
A movie about bringing down druglords that’s actually mostly about movies, Cédric Jimenez’s The Connection is stretched over driven-cop beats so familiar American audiences could probably follow it without subtitles. (It’s in French — add that to the title, and you get a sense of its police-film ambitions.)
What does the world sound like when you’re Brian Wilson? When you’ve made a record that sounds like cirrus clouds look — as Wilson did with the Beach Boys’ small modern miracle of harmony, the 1966 Pet Sounds — all bets are off when it comes to the way ordinary aural signals are processed on their journey through ear canal to eardrum and beyond.
When John Cusack was launching his career in the ’80s, Brian Wilson had gone from rock star to living lore — a brilliant Bigfoot. “People would have Brian Wilson encounters,” says Cusack, who plays Wilson in the new biopic Love & Mercy.
Twenty years ago, at the height of the UFO boom, the truest believers in alien abduction scenarios would argue that their most compelling evidence was the commonalities between regular people’s stories of nighttime visitations. Even under hypnosis, “abductees” testified to remarkably consistent waking-dream terrors…
The irony behind the innocence of much of The Beach Boys music is that the band’s main songwriter, Brian Wilson, was in fact insane. He has long admitted that voices inside his head inspired his music, and he was driven by a perfectionist’s OCD to do those voices justice. So…
Good or bad, Cameron Crowe movies build to improbable declarations of sincerity, to the great acts or speeches a man must loose from himself into a world too cynical to value them. His heroes always must filibuster regular life with their decency. Superficially, these acts and speeches are performed in…
A witty comedy from Spain will have its U.S. premiere at Coral Gables Art Cinema this Friday. The red carpet will be rolled out for director/writer/lead actor, Daniel Castro, who will make a personal appearance for the event. Ilusión, Castro’s feature debut, takes aim at the world of popular filmmaking on…
The San Andreas fault stretches 810 miles up the Pacific coast, roughly the length of a dozen Dwayne “The Rock” Johnsons lying end to end. When it rumbles, we’ll need all 12 of him to spring into action — although, as Brad Peyton’s San Andreas warns, that still won’t be enough to save the day.
As a middle-aged woman, I rarely have a conversation with other middle-aged women in which the subject of movies “for us” fails to come up. As a critic, I don’t really think of movies in terms of which ones are “for” me and which are not, but I know what these women mean.
Here’s the ingredients of most of today’s lefty issues docs: doom, doom, Koch brothers, Monsanto, doom, doom, CNN clips, doom, doom, upbeat guitars and the promise that everything can change if we just get involved. Andrew Morgan’s The True Cost leaves the Koches out of its rundown of the damage…
Poltergeist 2015 is to Poltergeist ’82 what today’s shipped-frozen-to-the-store Pizza Hut dough is to the kneaded-on-site pies the chain’s stoned cooks tossed in the Reagan era. It’s the same kind of thing, with the same shape and some shared ingredients, but the texture’s gone limp, and there’s no sense of…
During “Compliments,” a first-season sketch on Inside Amy Schumer, a group of female friends respond to every bit of praise with a verbal self-maiming: “I tried to look like Kate Hudson but ended up looking like a golden retriever’s dingleberry,” says one. Sighs another, “Of course I see everyone when…
The final episode of Mad Men was upbeat — if you enjoy the death of the counter-culture. On this special episode of the Voice Film Club podcast, Village Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl and editorial fellow Lara Zarum, along with the Voice’s TV critic Inkoo Kang, discuss the final episode…
In a junk-food summer, Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland is a defiant carrot stick, a blockbuster adventure flick where the message is “Think smart.” It’s a deliberate phooey to the kiddie carnage of movies like Transformers and The Avengers, which frighten children about the apocalypse before they can even spell the word…
Maybe we contain multitudes, and maybe we contain a couple of great splashes of primary colors. With one arm stretched high above his head, puppeteer Caroll Spinney has spent decades embodying the warmest of yellows and grimiest of greens, playing — in every sense of the word — Sesame Street’s…
In the decadent 21st Century, the summer movie season now sprawls from March through December. (Star Wars: Episode VII is due to awaken the Force December 18; every prior Star Wars picture has come out Memorial Day weekend.) But I’ll stick to tradition and call Memorial Day the start of…
