You may not realize that Cuban filmmaker Jessica Rodriguez makes documentaries. The Havana-born, Madrid-based 28-year-old has a gift for making her subjects forget they’re telling their most personal secrets to an unknown audience. “I think people only tell us what they want to, and the things they don’t say are…
Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem, is a film that makes you want to talk to the movie screen. The phenomena took co-director/co-writer Shlomi Elkabetz and his sister, co-director/co-writer and the film’s star Ronit Elkabetz, by surprise when they premiered the film at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. Speaking via…
Is it possible to essentially like a movie yet feel revulsion toward its script? David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars is clearly intended as a sharp satire of Hollywood ambition, vanity, avarice, and emptiness, and in places it’s smart and astringently funny. Yet it seems to fight its own bone…
Spike Lee still summons miracles — but sometimes you gotta dig for them. I can’t exactly recommend Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, his remake/cover/jazz-variation on Bill Gunn’s epochal indie lulu Ganja and Hess, but I can recommend Ganja and Hess, so elusive and bloody and challenging a picture that it’s…
If Grace Kelly had been raised by coyotes, she might have stalked the screen like Focus’ Margot Robbie, a va-va-voom blonde with bite. Robbie is too beautiful to play normal, too sly to play nice. Miscast as a shy saint in Craig Zobel’s upcoming Sundance hit Z for Zachariah, she…
Ten years ago, Wellington, New Zealand, was less welcoming of vampires. When Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, two unknown comedians, walked the streets in velvet frocks and ruffles for a 2005 sketch, dudes would drive by and scream homophobic slurs. Says Clement, “We were constantly abused.” Over the next decade,…
Many people won’t watch a film based solely on the fact that is was simply nominated for an Oscar. But if said movie takes home a statue, that’s another story. “Academy Award winner” in front of a film title, actor, or director carries weight. So here we are, just days…
There was an awkward moment between Fifty Shades of Grey star Dakota Johnson and her mom, Melanie Griffith, on the red carpet before the Oscars on Sunday. But the world got to see Johnson’s impressive talent for pretending uncomfortable situations don’t seem to bother her (see also: Fifty Shades of…
Celebrities are flesh, David Cronenberg would say. Maps to the Stars, the latest film from the cult director, paints a grim picture behind the veneer of celebrity, but it also probes deep below the surface to explore damaged people in search of validity through speciousness. Maps to the Stars follows…
Kevin Costner eases white America into the now with McFarland, USA, we hear about the Berlin Film Festival’s highs (Queen of Earth) and lows (Knight of Cups), and dip into the lukewarm waters of a second Hot Tub Time Machine movie. Also, there’s much praise for teen comedy The DUFF…
Shove off, John Hughes. The DUFF, a high-school comedy by Ari Sandel, opens by declaring that The Breakfast Club’s social categories are, like, way passé. Explains lead Bianca (Mae Whitman): “Jocks play videogames, princesses are on antidepressants, and geeks rule the world.” Today, be ye goth kid, science dweeb, or…
American Sniper notwithstanding, the first fresh multiplex trend to emerge in 2015 is Old White Dudes Learning How to Share Their World. First came Kevin Costner in the sour Black or White, playing a coot who discovers that black folks love their kids too, even in South Los Angeles. Who…
It seems as if, for every ten issue-oriented documentaries that essentially function as long-form magazine articles with images attached, we get perhaps one doc that exemplifies the methods of “direct cinema” — the observational mode of documentary filmmaking that allows audiences to observe from a detached remove. That mode is…
Five years ago, four losers passed out in a Jacuzzi, boiled back to 1986, healed their past wounds, rocked out to Poison, and returned to their timeline as gods. Thusly, Hot Tub Time Machine director Steve Pink was hailed as a minor deity: He’d taken a dumber-than-huffing-hairspray premise and made…
Empire most certainly wasn’t built in a day, but its reputation as a breakout hit has been made in virtually no time at all. Since the series debuted six weeks ago, every episode has drawn more viewers than the one before it. Buoyed by positive reviews and especially word of…
In the olden days, what month it was never mattered to movies. But today the late-winter months are well known as a weedy boneyard of mouth-breathing Hollywood castoffs, and we explore it at the cost of our patience, time, shekels, and optimism. For the love of everything holy, stay home…
In 2004, I worked at a bar in Kansas City’s River Market district. One night, a woman handed me her credit card to pay her tab; I looked at it and said, “HAHA. Your name is Monica Ross!” She made a big, exasperated noise and dropped her forehead to the…
Crazy-Pants Spy Parody Kingsman Smartly Exposes Us as the Bad Guys
No matter how you end up feeling about it, there sure is a lot of movie in Mommy, Xavier Dolan’s exuberant melodrama about an emotional firecracker of a teenager who, after being kicked out of a specialized school for setting the cafeteria on fire, goes home to live with his…
Here at last is peak Kendrick: In intimate long takes and in comic montage, she belts, hurts, swoons, and rages, always remaining appealingly human. You can tell, when Anna Kendrick scraps for her big notes, that she’s not a natural, that she’s working hard, that she’s living a dream. All…
Even if you’ve never seen or heard of a movie called She Killed in Ecstasy, isn’t it lovely to know that such a thing exists in the world? That 1971 eroto-thriller was a creation of prolific Spanish-born writer-director Jess Franco, who had a lasting career making florid B movies with…
Even fans of Fifty Shades of Grey admit the book is a literary atrocity. Novelist E.L. James’ erotic reveries read like the rantings of a drunken yokel — less “His firm hands cupped my breasts” and more “Holy crap! He’s touching my boobs!” The story is simple: 21-year-old virgin Anastasia…
