In a movie industry shamefully dominated by men, it’s tough to find films made by women, primarily for women. Sure, some men make films for women, but it’s tiresome to never see female directors or screenwriters working on cool, well-advertised projects – especially projects outside the genres of romance and…
The laws of supply and demand apply equally to real estate and reality television. In a marketplace saturated with options — Kardashians, Real Housewives of Anyplace, etc. — the value of each individual property is diminished. So how can Million Dollar Listing Miami, Bravo’s spin-off of its similar series in…
For all of the Fox News fear-mongering that Hollywood is out to indoctrinate us with liberal values, when it comes to pregnancy, the movies have for years been curiously conservative. If a woman gets knocked up, she either loses the baby by accident (cue waterworks) or carries it to term…
In January 2013, an incandescently brilliant American political activist and computer programmer named Aaron Swartz was hounded to suicide by the overzealous U.S. attorney for Massachusetts, Carmen Ortiz. Anyone who argues differently has a desk drawer full of government pay stubs. Brian Knappenberger’s The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of…
Romances are Hollywood’s most anxiety-inducing fantasy. Like superhero flicks or horror films, they exist in a phony world of big scenes and breathtaking climaxes. But while audiences know that geeks can’t meld with spiders and that the bogeyman isn’t real, they still hope to fall in love, and boy, it’d…
Comedies about the battle of the sexes tend to have one clear loser: the audience. Driven by an oppositional view of romance that proved outmoded and seldom funny, Think Like a Man introduced us to six men living in Los Angeles and their corresponding flames. Some of these entanglements were…
David Trueba’s wistfully charming six-time Goya Award-winning (including best film, director, and original screenplay) Living Is Easy with Eyes Closed circles a blip in Beatles history when a tour-weary John Lennon took a break from the band in 1966 and visited Almería, Spain, to film a role in Richard Lester’s…
On this week’s episode of the Voice Film Club podcast, Voice film critics Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek, along with L.A. Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson, discuss rom-com Begin Again (2:26), starring the always-interesting Mark Ruffalo. They also talk about the biting rom-com parody They Came Together (15:47), which might…
Reality TV cast members tend to have — how to put this nicely? — outgoing personalities. But it takes a special kind of exhibitionist to bare your ass on national television. Bonus points for doing so in the first five minutes of your new TV series’ first episode. Chris Leavitt…
There’s so much to see and explore at Diagon Alley, Universal Studios’ latest Harry Potter-themed expansion, that words and pictures can’t possibly do it any justice. But moving pictures? Now we’re talking. See also: 21 Things to Look Out for in Diagon Alley, Universal Orlando’s New Harry Potter Experience…
Romances are Hollywood’s most anxiety-inducing fantasy. Like superhero flicks or horror films, they exist in a phony world of big scenes and breathtaking climaxes. But while audiences know that geeks can’t meld with spiders and that the bogeyman isn’t real, they still hope to fall in love, and boy, it’d…
You might think the world of reality TV is a ladies’ game. But you’d be wrong. Housewives be damned; many reality shows reflect the unfortunate reality of the glass ceiling for professional women. Take the Million Dollar Listing franchise, for example. Bravo’s Los Angeles original and New York spin-offs both…
From the very start of the first episode of Million Dollar Listing Miami, you can already tell it’s going to be one saucy season. What else would you expect from a show that puts a zoom lens on our city’s luxury real estate market and the players who run it? …
With the newest addition to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios, fans will get to experience what it’s really like to be a witch or wizard wandering the streets of Diagon Alley. For all your wizardry needs, there’s a place to buy your schoolbooks, robes, approved pets,…
The weekend’s here, and with it comes one of the Bill Cosford Cinema’s first 35mm screenings since becoming a finalist for the Knight Arts Challenge. As expected, the Cosford Classics series is furthering its exploration of interesting filmmakers; this time, the name of the man is Jean-Luc Godard. Playing one…
Recently, Star Wars fans, along with much of the planet’s pop-culture collective, nearly ruptured the internet in their enthusiasm to share set-building photos from next year’s long-awaited new feature film. But these weren’t shots of just any set. They depicted the construction of the Millennium Falcon. You’ve never heard of…
It’s a great time to be a fan of movie musicals. Since the year 2000, theaters across the country have been filled with movies built to inspire audiences to gleefully sing along. Some disasters have come along the way — Les Misérables, Phantom of the Opera, and Rock of Ages…
“Destroy your safe and happy lives before it is too late,” the Mekons once sang. The smug suburban Dutch family in writer-director Alex van Warmerdam’s bleakly comic allegory Borgman never got the memo, which leaves them open to a peculiar and languorously sinister home invasion. Not even the backyard is…
As a movie, Agnieszka Holland’s four-hour Cold War drama Burning Bush makes for first-rate television. That’s no swipe. Rather, it’s an acknowledgment that, no matter how sophisticated cable serial storytelling has gotten or how episodic the latest superhero flicks, movies remain something different. Burning Bush trembles with hushed urgency, with…
If you think summer movies are clamorous, try a current Broadway musical. Watching Jersey Boys onstage is like soldiering through some extreme-eating contest where you’re force-fed dessert for three hours. It’s all falsetto heroics and hustled-through character drama, every beat of every scene overscored, overrehearsed, and overbearing. And it’s often…
The Rover, Australian filmmaker David Michôd’s followup to the brutish family drama Animal Kingdom, is a postapocalyptic Western from the Outback, a stretch of land that already looks like the world has been blown away. All Michôd needs to convince us of the devastation is a title card pegging the…
Recently, Star Wars fans, along with much of the planet’s pop-culture collective, nearly ruptured the internet in their enthusiasm to share set-building photos from next year’s long-awaited new feature film. But these weren’t shots of just any set. They depicted the construction of the Millennium Falcon. You’ve never heard of…
