Can’t keep track of when all your favorite shows return this year? You’ve come to the right place. Chances are now that the holiday season is over, and every station is done playing Home Alone 2 on a loop, your must watch show is nearing a return. Whether it be…
The bi-coastal film pod continues in 2015! In New York, Village Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl, along with Voice film critic Stephanie Zacharek, connect via the magic of the Internet with LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson to discuss the nominations for this year’s Academy Awards, announced on January 15…
It’s been over a year since Jeanette Garcia and Daryl Rodriguez created the Kickstarter for their documentary, World 1-1, and recently the filmmakers presented their film to a delighted audience at the Cosford Cinema here at Miami. It’s been months since their premiere in San Francisco at the Roxie Theater,…
Here’s the pipsqueak who has hauled himself up into a sharp-dressed leading man. Here’s the comic who’s boundlessly inventive in his swearing but also suave and commanding in pursuit of love, the motormouth horndog who yawps about like a puppy on fire but can melt your mother’s heart with his…
In Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, Navy SEAL Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) — an astoundingly talented marksman credited with more than 160 confirmed kills in Iraq — runs into a fellow veteran at a mechanic’s shop between deployments. The soldier shows Kyle an artificial leg and thanks him for saving his…
In the opening moments of Two Days, One Night, a working-class Belgian woman named Sandra (Marion Cotillard) wakes from a midday nap, takes a phone call, removes a tart from the oven, pops a pill, and begs herself not to cry. With a sense of having arrived in the middle…
Forget its generic title, its breakup setup, and its indie-standard Brooklyn walk-and-talks: Writer/director Desiree Akhavan’s Appropriate Behavior is the freshest comedy of life and love in the city since Obvious Child. Hilarious and heartbroken, Akhavan stars as Shirin, a bisexual Iranian-American video artist just bounced from her lover’s Gowanus apartment…
Anyone who loves Michael Mann movies, or even just the idea of Michael Mann movies, accepts that film style is a language and something more, a way of thinking, feeling, and looking that goes beyond basic plotting, dialogue, or character motivation. I can tell you pretty much everything that happens…
Emerson argued that each flourish and tendril of a work of art has its exact corollary in the mind of the artist, that creative expression is always, in its way, a sort of autobiography: Want to know the person? Look at her works. But Ralph Waldo never lived to see…
Among many other things, Girls has always been great satire, lampooning with scolding empathy the callowness, narcissism, and insufferableness of early-to-mid twentysomethings who are privileged enough to spend their post-grad years making mistake after mistake with no serious consequences. But the HBO dramedy’s fourth season, in which Hannah (Lena Dunham)…
All you need to know about Taken 3 is that Liam Neeson survives an explosive car crash — twice. Director Olivier Megaton even rewinds the second blast to show us how his hero escaped. It still doesn’t make sense. But who cares. The Taken franchise is rooted in implausibilities, specifically…
Describing Ava DuVernay’s quietly remarkable Selma to a friend, I caught myself referring to the Civil Rights Era as a historical event, a thing of the past, and then backtracked. The killing of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice at the hands of police officers — not to mention…
Paul Thomas Anderson was making serious movies long before he began making “serious” movies, ponderous works of certified art like There Will Be Blood and The Master. His earliest pictures, like Hard Eight and Boogie Nights, and even the later Magnolia, were wily, imperfect, vibrating with life like yeast springing…
Without dropping spoilers right and left, how do I explain that I’m completely baffled by the Spierig Brothers’ retro-futuristic thriller Predestination? So the she who’s really a he is the earlier version of the he we meet later on and the later version of the she who shows up near…
With the Miami Jewish Film Festival opening January 15, buzz just keeps growing. Some screenings have already sold out, a talented group of filmmakers is getting ready to visit, and the lineup of films is as diverse as ever before. Even though it’s been around for 18 years, it’s astounding…
“If everything were great, nothing would be great.” That line, from Scott Coffey’s smart and sweetly entertaining Adult World, is one of my favorite bits of movie dialogue from 2014, not least because it’s applicable to every movie genre — actually, every genre of everything. But in the movie world…
Because January is the dumping ground for mediocre Hollywood movies, Coral Gables Art Cinema is kicking off the year with a series of classic films that will remind cinephiles what great movies are. Few directors have had the lasting influence of Alfred Hitchcock, known for his masterful use of the…
Female filmmakers don’t often get the spotlight they deserve, especially because there are so few of them in the industry. Though I can’t say I’ve seen every film directed (or codirected) by a woman this year (notably Liv Ullmann’s Miss Julie), I’ve seen a good 50 or so. It doesn’t…
By Calum Marsh As critics busy themselves drawing up lists and handing out awards, it seems time to look ahead. Here are the ten films to get excited about during the year to come. 1. Jauja (Dir. Lisandro Alonso) Revered Argentine filmmaker Lisandro Alonso returns after 2008’s exquisite Liverpool with…
There’s something curiously airless about director Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken, the story of real-life Olympian and WWII P.O.W. Louis Zamperini. Early on, Louis (Jack O’Connell) and his fellow American soldiers are zipping through the golden skies, dogfighting with Japanese planes, and, though the B-24’s doors are open and the wind is…
Before worrying ourselves over its qualities as an adaptation or its findings as an experiment in just how much tumpety-tump parump-pa-bump the human mind can endure, let’s take a moment to marvel that Rob Marshall’s Into the Woods even exists — as a PG from Disney, no less! No matter…
In Rupert Wyatt’s highball-cool reworking of Karel Reisz’s 1974 The Gambler, Mark Wahlberg does not play a cop, does not shoot bad guys with a gun, and does not spend considerable time shirtless (though we do see him sulking in a bathtub, and there’s a fleeting wet T-shirt moment, too)…
