So many ideas in our country begin with the best of intentions and end up completely corrupted. From Lindsay Lohan’s acting career to the once-noble filibuster, well-meaning stuff sometimes just gets out of hand here. But has it caught up with Kickstarter, too? Launched in 2009, this crowd-funding platform seemed,…
Without big truth-telling scenes, grand, great-lady, Meryl Streep-type actors would be out of work. Hell, Meryl Streep would be out of work. But for now, at least, August: Osage County, John Wells’ film adaptation of Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway hit, keeps her out of the bread line. Streep plays…
Here’s a movie that’ll flop in Kabul. Lone Survivor, the latest by Battleship director Peter Berg, is a jingoistic snuff film about a Navy SEAL squadron outgunned by the Taliban in the mountainous Kunar province. After four soldiers — played with muscles and machismo by Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Emile…
The terrible reality of modern life is that even beautiful young people on a first date can’t go a whole evening without checking their phones. We need to be potentially connected to every possibility at all times; just allowing the present to happen has become increasingly foreign. That’s the idea…
So many ideas in our country begin with the best of intentions and end up completely corrupted. From Lindsay Lohan’s acting career to the once-noble filibuster, well-meaning stuff sometimes just gets out of hand here. But has it caught up with Kickstarter, too? Launched in 2009, this crowd-funding platform seemed,…
Nowadays, the most compelling stories play out across a whole host of platforms. Think back on Amanda Bynes’ epic meltdown. It wouldn’t have been half as interesting if it hadn’t unfolded on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook (you know you wish you could work out like her) and everywhere else imaginable. And…
By the time Cultist gets its 15 minutes on the phone with Australian actress Margot Robbie, she admits to having lost count of how many interviews she has done that day regarding her high-profile role in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street. “We’re probably in our 30s or something,”…
Poor Michael Bay. All he wanted to do was shill for some fancy new TV at a tech conference in Las Vegas, adding even more money to his heaps of cash from the Transformers films and Victoria’s Secret ads. But when the Miami-obsessed director took the stage at the International…
James, By now, your buddies have forwarded you the Reddit Ask Me Anything where a 24-year-old man with Diphallia — aka two penises — says he wants to give you a facial. Say yes…
Entourage has arrived in the Magic City. Vinnie, Ari, and the boys are back in Miami to film the movie version of the insanely popular HBO series that left us with a few too many loose ends. Filming has presumably begun today, so if you’re a fan, you might want…
Hide yo’ housewives, hide yo’ kids. Miami is set to become a center of smutty, mediocre soft porn when the Fifty Shades of Grey movie begins filming right in the middle of downtown. According to the West Australian, the Fifty Shades production crew has made a last-minute change to its…
For Downton Abbey fans, Miami’s a pretty lonely place. In other parts of the country, obsessed superfans have spent months actively searching for (or actively avoiding) spoilers about the fourth season, beginning this Sunday. They’ve been chatting non-stop about the death of Matthew, speculating about the future of Sybil’s son,…
One Florida man has proven that he’s the ultimate Breaking Bad superfan. Fort Myers’ resident Ryan Lee Carroll won a raffle to watch the season finale of the AMC series alongside its castmembers last September. But his love for the show didn’t stop there. Police have charged Carroll with running…
May the geeks happily invade Miami, because for the first time ever, there’s a science fiction film festival happening in our midst come January 2014. A few years back, two work buddies who shared a common interest in science fiction set out to create a movie. That little movie was…
Rosemary’s Baby notwithstanding, it’s usually only white suburban people who fall prey to movie ghosts and demons — they’re always the ones opening doors to rooms that shouldn’t be entered, stepping witlessly into pentagrams painted on the floor in goat’s blood, and wondering aloud, “You think this is some sort…
In 2013 there were a thousand bright lights and no strong center — even with Gravity, which ranked No. 8 on our tally of almost 100 critics’ bests. The results in this year’s Village Voice Film Poll, like the decisions arrived at by critics’ circles around the country, suggest that…
When Peter Guralnick released Last Train to Memphis, the first half of his superb two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, some people must have wondered, Who needs two books to tell the story of Elvis? They may as well have grumbled, “Two whole books about America?” Some lives, some careers, push…
When he was 13, Marilyn Manson — then just Christian schoolkid Brian Warner of Canton, Ohio — would hide out in the basement while his grandfather masturbated to bestiality porn. Then he’d go upstairs and cheer himself up by reading Mad magazine. The self-dubbed God of Fuck — who later…
In Never Say Never, the original Bieber biopic, we met the young pop star as a virtuoso, a kid who played every instrument, sang like an angel, and had hair that must have required some sort of deal with the devil. It reassured both skeptic chaperones and devoted fans that…
In 2013 there were a thousand bright lights and no strong center — even with Gravity, which ranked No. 8 on our tally of almost 100 critics’ bests. The results in this year’s Village Voice Film Poll, like the decisions arrived at by critics’ circles around the country, suggest that…
In Spike Jonze’s new sci-fi romance, Her, Joaquin Phoenix plays a divorcee who rebounds by falling in love with his smartphone. On a recent Wednesday, however, he’s a delinquent boyfriend, leaving his iPad abandoned on a chair in a Lebanese restaurant as he bounces off to the parking lot for…
Here’s where I write about how hard it is to draw up a 10-best list at the end of the year. Except it isn’t: I think of drawing up a list as an honor and a necessity, a way of putting 12 months of moviegoing into some sort of perspective…
