Jennifer M. Kroot’s To Be Takei is an affectionate portrait of the hardest-working member of the original cast of Star Trek, George Takei. That’s pronounced tuh-KAY, not tuh-KAI, as so many have misspoken it over the years, including but not limited to William Shatner, whose strained nonrelationship with Takei —…
According to inspirational sports movies, winning demands you train hard, play with heart, be a team, and not care about winning. So it goes in the sturdy, crowd-pleasing When the Game Stands Tall, a profile in saintliness puffed up from a true story: the Northern California Catholic school whose football…
Last month, television viewers were treated to one of the most highly anticipated so-bad-it-might-be-good sequels this side of Godfather 2: Sharknado 2: The Second One. The shark tale was so successful — we’re talking 4 million viewers successful — that SyFy and filmmakers The Asylum are partnering with Fathom Events…
In a year full of film adaptations of fantastical young-adult novels (Divergent, The Fault in Our Stars, Vampire Academy, The Giver), If I Stay confronts the audience with stark reality. Adapted from the book by Gayle Forman, the film finds its main character, Mia Hall, in a coma after a…
Ambient sounds, a screeching monkey, and some out of focus imagery greet you when Olho Nu (Naked Eye) begins. It’s arguably a jarring experience, and yet, the moment one sees Ney Matogrosso donning real goat horns, goatskin, bull tooth, and monkey hair, it makes perfect sense. This documentary is all…
It’s documentaries about famous figures always make me realize just how limited my views on certain subjects tend to be. With Revelando Sebastião Salgado (whose English title is Meeting Sebastião Salgado), the subject is photography, and more specifically, a man who I was formerly unacquainted with: renowned Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado. The film by Betse…
Action movies once reigned supreme with films like Die Hard and The Terminator dominating the ’80s and ’90s, yet it seems like in the early 2000s the genre laid dormant. But now, it’s making a comeback. One could say action movies evolved with the times; the term has come to…
On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of The Village Voice and Amy Nicholson of L.A. Weekly remember Robin Williams, who died on Monday. He was 63. They also recommend We Are Mari Pepa, a slight movie about growing up punk in Mexico, the Daniel…
“Elena, I had a dream about you last night,” Petra Costa, the woman who created the ultra-personal tribute to her dead sister that is Elena, says in the first lines of her film. It’s a perfectly apt way to introduce a film that’s as dreamlike as the very memories we…
In the highly imperfect world of contemporary romantic comedies, What If is as close to perfect as anything we’ve got, not least for the way it captures the abject hopefulness of young people who’d like to be in love but don’t know how to go about it. Who does know…
In Calvary, Brendan Gleeson plays a Catholic priest who plods through a rustic Irish village that’s more brutal than beautiful. The beach is gray, the waves are choppy, and the wind whips his ankle-length black cassock as though every step were a fight against nature. In some ways, it is…
When you put a pair of losers in uniforms, at the end of the day they’re still losers. Best friends and roommates Justin (Damon Wayans Jr.) and Ryan (Jake Johnson) learn that the hard way but not without finding some joy in the fantasy that you can become the success…
Titles don’t get more ironic than The Expendables 3. The franchise claims to be about death-seeking mercenaries yet stars ’80s action heroes, who refuse to die. Three films in, everyone in the sprawling team is still alive and ass kicking, save for Bruce Willis, whose million-dollar-a-day asking salary has caused…
The Giver is more simple and raw than the rest of today’s teen dystopias that try to cram in unnecessary backstory and love triangles. (Original author Lois Lowry published her novel in 1993, which makes it officially the cool aunt of Katniss and the kids.) The story picks up several…
The loss of a great actor is something that affects many people, not just those fortunate enough to have known the talent personally. In the case of actor and comedian Robin Williams, his career and heart touched the lives of many, not only those around him. His jokes and unique…
Inspired by Universal Pictures’ forthcoming vampire origin tale, Dracula Untold, Universal Orlando adds a little bite to its roster for this year’s Halloween Horror Nights (HHN). Starting in September, prepare to get lost in the history of Dracula — actually physically lost — with the Dracula Untold: Reign of Blood…
Even those of us who loved Robin Williams as a performer would have to say that sometimes he was too much — too wired, too pleading, too on. There were times when I’d see him nattering away on a late-night talk show, or suffer through a performance like the one…
Sometimes, if not often enough, movies demand to be watched as something more than just expensive daydreams — they come festooned with real-world urgency and relevance, and the context of their existence kicks the shit out of how entertained we may or may not be at any given moment. No…
Lasse Hallström has become an expert at making mom-jeans movies, nonthreatening pictures in which headstrong women find love just when they think it’s too late (Once Around), take the upper hand with their cheating husbands (Something to Talk About), and turn small, French villages topsy-turvy by opening chocolate shops (Chocolat)…
Land Ho! is a How Grandpa Got His Groove Back for the geezer set, a buddy road trip through Iceland starring two divorced men with a combined age of 150 years. The writer-directors, Martha Stephens and Aaron Katz, are 30 and 34, young enough to be their leading men’s grandchildren…
Star presence, that distillation of charisma and sometimes glamour, lies at the heart of the movies’ appeal. The star presence James Harvey evokes so richly in his new book, Watching Them Be, is never simply about physical beauty. Harvey rightly points out that Ingrid Bergman’s fresh unaffectedness was distinctly unglamorous,…
Daniel Radcliffe’s first trip to Comic-Con kicked off like the world’s cuddliest Nuremberg rally. This summer, just minutes after he walked into Hall H, the hangar-sized sardine can of 6,500 people sang him “Happy Birthday.” It was an emotional moment for everyone. “The fact that I was turning 25 slightly…
