Before you buy that tiny box turtle in Chinatown, know that it can live for 100 years. Which means that among all the Mad Libs nonsense of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles — a comic book-turned-media-phenomenon that’s always half-admitted it’s a goof — at least the teenage part is accurate…
Incompatible fronts collide in director Steven Quale’s weather-horror patience-tester Into the Storm. The first is the summertime yen for righteous kablooey, the dumber the better, exemplified here by drunk galoots hauling ass into a twister on a four-wheeler ATV, tossing beer cans and whooping about getting a “million YouTube hits.”…
Emma Stone and Colin Firth in Magic in the Moonlight.On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice and Amy Nicholson of L.A. Weekly discuss Woody Allen’s latest, Magic in the Moonlight, and revisit Get on Up and Guardians of the Galaxy, and…
James Brown stripped pop to its rhythmic essentials: the groove and the grunt, the bridge, and the scream. Tate Taylor’s Get On Up likewise reduces James Brown — and the biopic form — to all that matters most. Here are the highs of the man’s life, both artistic and recreational…
As news develops on the detention of immigration activist Jose Antonio Vargas, the director of the award-winning documentary film Documented, Miami might soon have a second opportunity to see his film. Local immigration attorney Joseph Lackey has booked the encore screening of the film, and has positive a perspective on…
Oscar Isaac is a very busy man. The Guatemalan-Cuban heartthrob is not only currently filming the latest Star Wars installment, he also has two films slated to be released later this year. One is a thriller with Jessica Chastain, A Most Violent Year, and the other is also a thriller,…
On this week’s , Stephanie defends her Guardians of the Galaxy review against internet trolls who tell her to go suck eggs, and we touch on Scarlett Johansson in Lucy and the excellent James Brown biopic Get on Up. There’s a lot to be had in this one. Enjoy. [Subscribe…
Happee Birthdae, Harry! The Boy Who Lived was born 34 years ago today in the quaint town of Godric’s Hollow. (He starts Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry when he’s 11 in 1991, so math proves he was born in 1980.) This special day is also shared with another incredible…
Mood Indigo is bitter candy, a heartbreaker that uses sugar as a trap. The director, Michel Gondry, has a brilliant, contradictory brain. He’s a swoony pessimist, a big-dreaming romantic who believes in love at first sight but never lets his films end with a kiss. Instead, his idea of a…
Beware the movie that’s Fun! with a capital F, the one populated with seemingly unpretentious characters that say adorable, clever things, the one that presents each off-kilter joke as if it were a porcelain curio, the one that boasts a comfort-food soundtrack of songs you’ve always liked but perhaps haven’t…
He couldn’t have known it at the time, but James Brown’s debut recording and first chart hit — made in 1956 with the Famous Flames — is a question that contains its own answer. The lyrics to “Please, Please, Please” speak, pretty obviously, of sexual desire. But Brown’s voice is…
“The heart wants what it wants,” Woody Allen has taught us, and apparently what his heart wants these days is not to have to bother with writing second drafts of film scripts. His latest, Magic in the Moonlight, plays like a sumptuous vacation, its stars larking in ’20s finery about…
Mood Indigo is bitter candy, a heartbreaker that uses sugar as a trap. The director, Michel Gondry, has a brilliant, contradictory brain. He’s a swoony pessimist, a big-dreaming romantic who believes in love at first sight but never lets his films end with a kiss. Instead, his idea of a…
As an ER physician, Dr. Ryan McGarry is probably the only filmmaker Cultist can forgive for calling in for a scheduled interview five hours late. Speaking via phone from New York City, where he moved last year to work at Cornell Medical Center at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, the 32-year-old doctor…
For Edson Jean and Joshua Jean-Baptiste, the true story of Miami is made up of a million small vignettes of daily life that come together to create our collective reality. The two New World School Of Arts graduates are Haitian Americans who want to tell a uniquely Miami tale of…
For all of Marvel’s out-there and enthusiastic actors, there are always a couple that lean towards the calm and quiet side of things. But you probably wouldn’t expect Guardians of the Galaxy’s David Bautista, a wrestler, to be that kind of guy. His character, Drax the Destroyer, might be an…
With Jack Nicholson still enjoying his retirement, it falls to Michael Douglas to swoon over the oh-so-cutesy Diane Keaton in And So It Goes, a timid, elder rom-com in the same wheelhouse as the 2003 Nicholson-Keaton team-up, Something’s Gotta Give. A film of nothing but soft edges, director Rob Reiner’s…
With his stately drawl, Morgan Freeman has narrated nonfiction documentaries about penguins, slavery, the lemurs of Madagascar, ancient Egyptian pharaohs, and the expansion of the universe. His is a voice of authority tempered by warmth and wisdom, capable of evoking felt human experience and the majesty of creation. In writer-director…
One could be forgiven for being skeptical that a Hercules movie starring Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson and directed by Brett “Rush Hour Trilogy” Ratner might have a brain in its head, but it actually does. We’re not talking Snowpiercer levels of intelligence, but it’s far less aggressively stupid than, say,…
On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, Amy Nicholson of the L.A. Weekly and Stephanie Zacharek of The Village Voice interview film critic and author Karina Longworth, who’s just launched a fascinating new podcast on the history of Hollywood called You Must Remember This. [Subscribe to the Voice Film Club…
If the clothes of Yves Saint Laurent were groundbreaking, the designer’s mystique was as subtle as the curve of an invisibly molded sleeve. Those who have picked up just a little Saint Laurent lore may know about his beginnings at the House of Dior in the late ’50s and his…
Uncomfortable-silence auteur Joe Swanberg has made a career of testing how much falseness you can strip out and still have a movie. What if people on-screen talked like people off it, and they spent as much time looking at phones and laptops as you do, and if their moments of…
