Imagine Donald Trump wanted to reboot his disastrous presidential campaign announcement month to start over as a younger man with real hair. In Tarsem Singh’s Self/less, Trump could hire the medical geniuses of Phoenix Biogenic to transfer his aging brain into a strapping hot bod for $250 million — the…
Hollywood lives by the simple, sad axiom “Where there’s money, there’s more money,” which is how we get remakes of movies that sometimes shouldn’t have been made in the first place, two Spider-Man reboots within five years, and a Star Wars franchise that ensures our children’s children will revere George…
The death of Amy Winehouse, in July 2011, at age 27, was one of the first great tragedies of 21st-century pop music, an event — like the deaths of Tupac Shakur and Kurt Cobain in the last decade of the 20th — that emphasized the jarring contrast between the fragility…
Even if you live in the same city or town your whole life, the place you came from is always a distant country: Old trees are cut down to be replaced, one hopes, by new ones; shops and businesses change ownership or, worse, are torn down; landmarked buildings may stay…
On the fringes of movieland, there have always been filmmakers who identify (in Günter Eich’s phrase) as being sand, not oil, in the gears of the world. Aleksei German, dead in 2013 at 74, could be thought of as this tribe’s most extreme rock star, in his work-life and in…
There’s no one right way to show mental illness in the movies, yet there are hundreds of ways to get it wrong. Even though certain disorders come with specific traits, a diagnosis is not a human being, and doomed is the actor who just cycles through symptoms, rather than working…
Patrick Brice may not be a filmmaker you’ve heard of, but with two interesting films being released this month, he’s bound to make a splash. The first, which stars Mark Duplass, is Creep. The second, which opened in Miami last week and opens further this Friday, is The Overnight. It’s…
After twelve years on the air, The Daily Show With Jon Stewart became required viewing during the Dubya years, when much of the nation was desperate to look to almost anyone else for political leadership. The Comedy Central series offered nightly catharsis in five- or eight-minute bursts, voicing the anger…
The upcoming Amy Winehouse documentary Amy is one of the best music docs Village Voice film critic Stephanie Zacharek has ever seen, and she explains why to Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl and LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson this week. Also this week: The confusing (yet really, really enjoyable)…
Too often, Hollywood film reduces love to romanticized lust between people. Yet, in truth, Love can be a slippery thing, as it comes from within a single person, transmuted by perception of the other, which can in turn, influence the feelings of the source. Time and environment has an effect,…
Crystal Moselle’s documentary The Wolfpack is a Manhattan fable about fear. Two decades ago, a Hare Krishna conspiracy theorist and self-described god named Oscar Angulo moved from Peru to a public housing tenement on the Lower East Side with his American bride, Susanne, whom he’d met and wooed on the Inca Trail.
Steven Soderbergh’s 2012 Magic Mike was a cocktease. The ads tempted audiences with sweaty chests and thrusting crotches, but after Soderbergh lured us in to his all-male strip club, he turned on the lights to show us the squalor. His hunks were drugged and morally decayed.
Five films into the franchise, Terminator: Genisys feels like a VHS cassette that’s been rewound and recorded over for 21 years. Director Alan Taylor (of the unmemorable Thor: The Dark World) gives us images — a thumbs-up, an abandoned factory, a liquid-metal cop smashing through the windshield of a car…
On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, the LA Weekly’s Amy Nicholson and the Village Voice’s Alan Scherstuhl in New York disagree on just about everything in Ted 2 — except that it has a few very funny moments — but only after revisiting the impressive Inside Out, which is…
Just after the recent success of their Stanley Kubrick mini-retrospective that included A Clockwork Orange, 2001: A Space Odyssey & The Shining, O Cinema Miami Beach is delivering yet another retrospective of a well-known filmmaker this month. Kicking off June 26th, the filmmaker of choice is the man who pretty…
Since premiering his latest feature, The Strongest Man, at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, Miami-based filmmaker Kenny Riches only has had good news to report. His biggest coup: winning a distribution deal with FilmBuff, a national indie distributor that has arranged for a VOD release of the film…
Some movies are indefensible, and Ted 2 is one of them. Not only is this a movie about a libidinous, foul-mouthed stuffed bear; it’s the sequel to an earlier movie about a libidinous, foul-mouthed stuffed bear. But I laughed and laughed at Ted 2 — as I did at the…
Miami resident Liz Nolan, 23, will be joining the cast of CBS’s summer reality show, Big Brother. The show, a broadcast television staple, now in its 17th season, features 14 contestants locked in a house, their every move filmed, as fellow cast members vote on who’s allowed to remain in…
There’s no reverie that Alonso Ruizpalacios’ Güeros can’t shatter, no presumed truth it can’t complicate, no expectation of closure it won’t dash. Set in Mexico City during 1999’s 292-day student strike at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, the film is about — if any one thing — proximity to decisiveness,…
One of the nastiest tricks the bastards ever played was to convince so many artists that it’s best never to be strident. In the name of aesthetics or audience-pleasing or just not wanting to come off as shrill, a great many artists deny themselves — and their art — both…
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl may not be the best teen cancer weepie ever made, if there even is a best teen cancer weepie. But it’s surely the most adorable, for better or worse — less like The Fault in Our Stars and more like Diary of a…
Part of what makes writer-director Rick Famuyiwa’s Dope so fresh and joyous is that in many key ways it’s not new at all. Like Dazed & Confused or The Breakfast Club, this is a film about just how weird the extraordinarily normal kids are — kids like you. The teen…
