During a 2009 Daily Show interview with Maziar Bahari, the Canadian-Iranian journalist who, earlier that year, had been imprisoned in Iran for 118 days on espionage charges, Jon Stewart said, “We hear a lot about the banality of evil, but so little about the stupidity of evil.” Or about its…
It’s a special The Daily Show edition of the Voice Film Club podcast, as we talk about Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher (starring Steve Carell) and move onto Rosewater, the movie Jon Stewart left The Daily Show for three months in 2013 to direct. Both are in theaters starting November 14. See…
For almost 15 years, the Byron Carlyle Theater has been a neon haltered shell of its former self. Before the projectors went dark in 2001, the 71st street cinema had been a North Beach fixture for decades, standing as the local theater du jour for many, since it opened with…
With a third theater opening this week, and a line-up that’s consistently dedicated to spreading lesser known films, it’s no surprise that O Cinema makes a great home for independent filmmakers. And with that comes the opportunity to introduce South Florida communities to cultures they don’t typically see on screen…
There’s more television today than at any other point in the medium’s history, but there’s a good chance you’re stuck in a TiVo rut. That’s because, with a handful of exceptions, this fall has delivered a truckload of mediocrity and dead-on-arrival trends. (Goodbye, “rom-sit-coms” like the already canceled A to…
There’s so much space in Christopher Nolan’s nearly three-hour intergalactic extravaganza Interstellar that there’s almost no room for people. This is gigantosaurus movie entertainment, set partly in outer space and partly in a futuristic dustbowl America where humans are in danger of dying out, and Nolan — who cowrote the…
Ruben Östlund makes films the way sociologists devise thought experiments: by posing a hypothesis and thinking fully through its consequences. The Swedish director’s previous feature, 2011’s Play, follows a group of black teenagers in Gothenburg as they blithely coerce a trio of affluent white children to hand over their valuables…
The greatest lie of the past 80 years: “Never again.” At this moment, Omar al-Bashir, the world’s wickedest despot, is free not only to rule the Sudan but also to make diplomatic visits to international allies — China, Saudi Arabia — despite the calls of the International Criminal Court (ICC)…
Quick, name the most expensive housing market in America. If you said New York, Los Angeles, or Miami, you couldn’t be farther from the truth — literally. Each is more than 1,500 miles away from Williston, North Dakota, a monochrome town you can drive end-to-end in 15 minutes. In four…
Imagine if nerdy Clark Kent didn’t have to remove his glasses and pocket protector to save the world. Then imagine him as fat and sweet as a marshmallow. Meet Big Hero 6’s Baymax, Disney’s new cuddly champion: a waddling, inflatable health-care companion who can sense your pulse, diagnose disease, and,…
A newly renovated cinema house in North Beach is ready for its close-up. Once owned by Wometco and then Regal Cinemas, the Byron Carlyle, named after the avenues that sandwiched it when it first opened in 1968, will reopen Friday under the direction of O Cinema with the Michael Keaton…
Christopher Nolan’s space epic Interstellar is a big, ambitious picture but it didn’t connect with our critics. We discuss the film at the top of this week’s podcast before moving onto a few other notable films on screens large and small this week. See also: Our review of Christopher Nolan’s…
A newly renovated cinema house in North Beach is ready for its close-up. Once owned by Wometco and then Regal Cinemas, the Byron Carlyle, named after the avenues that sandwiched it when it first opened in 1968, will reopen Friday under the direction of O Cinema with the Michael Keaton…
Here’s a question the rest of us are lucky never to have had to think about: How many people does it take to bear away the corpse of a grown gorilla? Early in Virunga, Orlando von Einsiedel’s stunning heartbreaker of a doc, we see men, a dozen or so, carrying…
Wynwood is constantly teeming with photo shoots and roving videographers setting their works in the color-drenched backdrop of once-bedraggled warehouses turned blossoming outdoor art museum. People make music videos, build modeling portfolios, and create surreal melodramas there. And some have taken to making documentaries about this burgeoning nerve center of…
Last night, on Lifetime’s season premier of Project Runway All Stars, Patricia Michael’s A-line dress with “torpedo darts” sent the New Mexican designer packing. As the finalists’ first challenge, the designers were split right down the middle with the fellas busting out tasteful albeit edgy designs for Manhattan’s downtown girl,…
You can’t live in New York for more than ten days without meeting some truly dreadful people: couples who fret about having to choose between buying a summer home and having a second child, even as you’re struggling to pay your monthly rent; large groups of people getting together for…
Jake Gyllenhaal is accustomed to exhaustion. During his research for the LAPD drama End of Watch, he spent five months patrolling the streets with real-life police officers until 7 a.m. It was good preparation for his new movie Nightcrawler, a blistering portrait of a morally corrupt crime-scene videographer who works…
Jazz isn’t dead. Miraculously, there’s always a small but steady stream of young people who continue to fall in love with this most dazzling and elusive American genre, spending hours, days, and months running ribbons of scales and memorizing Charlie Parker solos in the hopes that some of the alto…
Jake Gyllenhaal, not a particularly bulky guy to begin with, dropped 20 pounds or so to play a Los Angeles misfit who finds his calling as a freelance crime videographer in Dan Gilroy’s nervy thriller Nightcrawler. Even when Robert De Niro does it, weight change isn’t acting — it’s the…
Alexandre Aja’s Horns is the rare YA-ish romance that doesn’t make like a guidance counselor and force the characters to shake hands and forgive. It’s a biblically tinged, eye-for-an-eye vengeance thriller about an emo boyfriend named Ig (Daniel Radcliffe) whose childhood sweetheart Merrin (Juno Temple) has been murdered underneath the…
Before there was a Birdman, there was a Batman — several, in fact — though the best was played by Michael Keaton in the two Tim Burton films in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Since then, Christian Bale’s somber strutting and muttering, as seen in Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies,…
