Captain America: The Winter Soldier Is Solid, Exciting

Tucked into a pocket of his workout sweats, Steve Rogers — AKA Captain America, the serum-enhanced Yankee Doodle Dynamo who’s spent the past six decades in deep freeze — keeps a notebook of cultural beats he’s missed: Star Wars, Marvin Gaye, Thai food. (“We used to boil everything,” he mock-groans.)…

Nymphomaniac: Volume II Rewards but Doesn’t Reveal

Our story resumes: Having found a love-like feeling for Jerôme (Shia LaBeouf), “restful domestic comfort” has, at the outset of Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac: Volume II, robbed the young Joe (Stacy Martin) of her orgasm. Naomi Wolf documented a similar problem in her 2012 book Vagina; the similarities between Joe…

Point for Rumsfeld

“I’ve interviewed a lot of nasty characters over the years,” says a cheerful Errol Morris over lunch on a bright Los Angeles day. “I’m a connoisseur of bullshit.” He’s sampled some of the finest: Holocaust deniers, murderers swearing their innocence, a beauty queen who claims she only kidnapped and raped…

Cesar Chavez: Yes, We Can Make Better Biopics Than This One

The Chicano labor leader César Chávez can now join Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela in the pantheon of heroes whose world-altering achievements are dutifully recounted in timid, lifeless films any substitute can pop into the school DVD player when the regular history teacher is out sick. With César Chávez, Mexican…

Bloody Floody: Noah Wants to Be a Mad Epic

To hear Darren Aronofsky tell it, in the interviews he’s given recently to the New York Times Magazine and the New Yorker, there was no way in hell he’d let his special-effects extravaganza Noah, years in the planning, be your run-of-the-mill, candy-ass Biblical epic. The ark built by Russell Crowe’s…

Sabotage Is a Belt of Bourbon After Years of Sipping Diet Pepsi

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s name is only about one-seventh the font size of the title on the poster of Sabotage, formerly Breacher, formerly Ten, his third attempt — after the full-auto western The Last Stand and the goofy Stallone-co-headlined prison-break joint Escape Plan — in 14 months at a post-gubernatorial comeback. A…

American Horror Story Season Four Set in South Florida

It all started Monday afternoon when television writer and producer Ryan Murphy, who had been on a Twitter hiatus for almost two months, tweeted five simple words and a logo. “AMERICAN HORROR STORY SEASON FOUR:” with a photo of a carnival-inspired font reading “Freak Show” was all fans needed to…

Ralph Fiennes on Working With Wes Anderson in The Grand Budapest Hotel

Wes Anderson’s latest cinematic confection, The Grand Budapest Hotel, features distinguished English actor Ralph Fiennes in the film’s leading role. It marks the first time Fiennes has appeared in one of Anderson’s films. Speaking over the phone from his London home, Fiennes revealed a great admiration for Anderson’s work. “I love…

In Nymphomaniac: Volume I, Von Trier Plunges Deep

Let’s start with the ending, the closing credits disclaimer that insists that none of the lead actors in Lars von Trier’s two-part erotic epic Nymphomaniac filmed penetrative sex. If there is real sex in the movie, and it sure looks like there is, it must have been the duty of…

Muppets Most Wanted Is a Great Caper

If you count forward from Jim Henson’s mid-1960s TV appearances with a fringy pup named Rowlf and the lizard, made from an old winter coat, who would later become Kermit the Frog, the Muppets have outlived most of their early puppet peers by more than two generations: You don’t see…

Shailene Woodley Proves More Human Than Divergent

Dystopian movies don’t have to make sense. As the audience, we’re obligated to sit down with our popcorn and soda and pretend that yes, of course, in the future monkeys rule the earth, women can’t bear children, and Arnold Schwarzenegger is an everyday construction worker. It’s a mutual contract of…