The great sins of the 20th century are already too many to list, but let us note one more: the abduction of infants from mothers deemed unworthy or undesirable by governments and religious institutions. Thousands of children were kidnapped from leftist parents during Argentina’s and Spain’s respective dictatorships, while children…
A favorite pastime of those who love Asian film is to carp about Hollywood’s annoying tendency to lay claim to and defile their favorites. But Spike Lee’s Oldboy is the remake that came too late, so benign and unmemorable that not even people who loved Park Chan-wook’s 2003 original will…
The breadth of director Shaul Schwarz’s documentary Narco Cultura is staggering. A hybrid of hard investigative journalism and incisive cultural criticism, the film at its core is about definitions of success and power, and how today those terms are shaped by the shared forces of poverty and celebrity culture…
Thirteen-year-old Canadian actress Sophie Nélisse is flicking paper airplanes across the windowless conference room of the Ritz-Carlton Miami Beach when Cultist walks in to meet her and British director Brian Percival. Percival, best known as the Emmy-winning director of many episodes of Downton Abbey, and Nélisse are at the end…
Through the soaring windows of the Mandarin Oriental Miami, it’s hard not to notice the blue skies and matching azure water. Most people find Miami’s beachy, serene views relaxing. But for fans of The Hunger Games, the vacation vista could just as easily conjure images of blister-forming nerve gas, vicious…
It had to happen: There’s so much voiceover narration in today’s movies, so much needless verbal play-by-play, that it was only a matter of time before somebody made a picture narrated by that life of the party himself, Death. The Grim Reaper delivers the opening monologue of The Book Thief,…
In May 1962, a cease-fire was declared with colonial Algeria, marking the first time in 23 years that France was not at war. Filmmaker Chris Marker and cinematographer Pierre Lhomme took to the streets of Paris that month with a handheld camera (a new model also used by Jean Rouch…
It says something that two of the biggest sensations in young adult literature over the past 10 years have featured heroines who keep more than one guy on the line at a time. No longer do the genre’s bright young women sit around waiting for one Mr. Right to notice…
When Claire Denis’ blood-and-lust-filled reverie Trouble Every Day, her most maligned project to date, premiered in New York in 2002, it opened on only one postage-stamp-size screen. Now comes the chance to consider anew — or, like this writer, see for the first time — a hypnotic, unsettling work by…
Imagine an alternate history for Vince Vaughn. What if, 18 years ago, instead of rehearsing Swingers during the day and sampling Los Angeles’ starlets at night, he channeled his sexual energy into masturbating for cash at a sperm bank? He could have become Delivery Man’s David Wozniak, father of 533…
For all its nasty twists, the biggest shock in Spike Lee’s remake of Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (opening November 27) hits in the movie’s first minutes — during the credits. “A Spike Lee Film,” a title card reads, a first for any of Lee’s features. Jungle Fever, He Got Game, Inside…
The breadth of director Shaul Schwarz’s documentary Narco Cultura is staggering. A hybrid of hard investigative journalism and incisive cultural criticism, the film at its core is about definitions of success and power, and how today those terms are shaped by the shared forces of poverty and celebrity culture. Schwarz…
In The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, opening this Friday, Alan Ritchson and Stephanie Leigh Schlund play two of the story’s fiercest bad guys. But tucked away in a hotel room on the 17th floor of the Mandarin Oriental in Brickell, the pair are just a couple Southern kids with a…
You’re probably already sold on Dwyane Wade’s basketball skills. If you’re a superfan, you may have also bought some accessories from his lines of ties and socks. Perhaps you’ve read his memoir, A Father First. If you’ve done all those things and are still hungry for more #3, D-Wade has…
When news of the Penn State sex abuse scandal broke in 2011, diehard fans pledged their devotion as they kneeled on then-Coach Joe Paterno’s lawn. What is it about sports that gets everybody so riled, and more importantly, so ready to deny wrongdoing? This is one of many perplexing questions…
Through the soaring windows of the Mandarin Oriental Miami, it’s hard not to notice the blue skies and matching azure water. Most people find Miami’s beachy, serene views relaxing. But for fans of The Hunger Games, the vacation vista could just as easily conjure images of blister-forming nerve gas, vicious…
Few men wear a dress as meaningfully as comedian Chris Lilley. Since 2005, he has sported the pinstriped schoolgirl uniforms of his native Australia to play Ja’mie King, a perfect little monster created by an ungodly mix of wealth, vapidity, and cheerful cruelty. Ja’mie returns to HBO on November 24…
“This movie has been written about in books — go figure — and there’s discussion about whether or not it’s actually a zombie movie. And I can tell you it’s not; it’s not a zombie movie.” So says director Thom Eberhardt about 20 minutes into the commentary for his low-budget…
AirwolfberlinJonathan Brandis hanged himself 10 years ago this week at Sixth and Detroit in Los Angeles, in the second-floor hallway of an apartment building south of Hollywood near a decent doughnut shop and a cat groomer. He was 27 years old. And he was my first big crush. If you’re…
Claire Denis douses Bastards in her usual oblique dreaminess, equal parts romantic and malevolent, shot by Denis and cinematographer Agnès Godard in inky nocturnal HD that posits the proceedings as a gradual descent into a black hole of vengeance and vice. Yet that style can’t fully compensate for a tale…
Can it be true that the apple-cheeked Midwestern evangelicals who send their money, their teenagers, and their last-century sexual mores to Uganda genuinely see no link between their fervently anti-gay, anti-condom preaching and that country’s movement to make homosexuality not only illegal but also punishable by death? The toothsome young…
How is it that no one had yet made the Lucien Carr-David Kammerer murder story into a movie? It’s an irresistible tall tale from the Beat back catalogue — how, once upon a time in the mid-’40s, the finger-snapping legends-to-be (Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs) all coalesced around the radiant rebel Carr…
