Film, TV & Streaming

Golden Globes are nice, and Emmys are swell, but Julian Fellowes’ British period drama Downton Abbey is making its mark beyond pop culture. It’s headed to Parliament…

I could write a Shakespearean sonnet about each film on my Top 10 of 2013, but we know we’re all here for the agreements and arguments. (Plus, have you tried writing about Joe Swanberg in iambic pentameter?) Ladies and gentlemen, let’s begin…

If you’re a person alive in this age, Ralph Fiennes has at some point probably made you hate him. As the Nazi Amon Goeth in 1993’s Schindler’s List, Fiennes embodied one of history’s great evils, somehow making being utterly detestable compelling. In Martin McDonagh’s riotous, under-regarded In Bruges, Fiennes spat…

What becomes a legend most? After prolonged incubation, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom offers the biopic’s usual reply: legend itself. Bigger, louder, more expensive legend, brought to bear by the best talents and technologies of the day. The name Nelson Mandela has long been shorthand for the things Mandela shows…

In the 20 years since Reality Bites, his directorial debut, Ben Stiller has metastasized from sketch comedy lunatic to Generation X darling to blockbuster king. Among the funnymen, most of whom have calcified into cliques (yawn, Anchorman 2), he’s the last of the triple-threat writer-director-stars and the only one who…

Here’s a question you never thought you’d hear Noam Chomsky answer: “What makes you happy?” That puzzler comes near the end of Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?, an animated marvel of a film rigged to set your brain off like fireworks. The great linguist and activist’s easy surge…

Michel Gondry likes video stores. He is, after all, the director of the ultimate VHS sonnet, Be Kind Rewind, in which Jack Black and Mos Def re-create classics like Ghostbusters from plastic bags and tinsel. (Sad about the death of Blockbuster? Give it a watch.) One night, Gondry was browsing…

Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street is the kind of movie directors make when they wield money, power, and a not inconsiderable degree of arrogance. Sprawling and extravagant, it revels in all manner of excess, including sexual debauchery, hearty abuse of liquor and quaaludes, even dwarf-tossing. Its antihero, the…

The surprise in Grudge Match, the not-quite-a-comedy that pits Rocky Balboa against Raging Bull, isn’t that it has the chutzpah to posit a universe in which Sylvester Stallone and Robert De Niro have, since the early ’80s, been equally matched rivals. The surprise is in how easily audiences will buy…

Solemn as a funeral march, humorless as your junior high principal, as Japanese as a grocery-store California roll, Keanu Reeves’s let’s-mope-about-and-kill-ourselves samurai drama has exactly three things going for it. First, the cockeyed sensuality of Rinko Kikuchi as a spider-puking evil witch who can transform herself into a fox, a…

Before you run out to see one of the several movies opening on this Christmas Day 2013, listen to this very special Voice Film Club podcast: Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl runs point while Voice film critic Stephanie Zacharek and L.A. Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson run down their top…

As awards season draws nearer and best-of-the-year lists keep rolling in, there’s only one thing left to do: get excited about what comes next. Here’s ten films you won’t want to miss in 2014…

There’s camp, and then there’s camp: pop culture so awesomely awful that it ends up being just, well, awesome. Many of Elvis Presley’s flicks fall into the aforementioned category (ok, all), but the campiest by far is Clambake, a 1967 Miami beach movie encompassing erudite themes like the science of…

Three types of artists hinge on authenticity: punk bands, folk singers, and rappers. Actors, like Oscar Isaac, are by definition phonies. But the star of the Joel and Ethan Coen’s new film, Inside Llewyn Davis, gets that pressure to keep it real. In high school, he was a straight-edge punk…

Spanish director Antonia San Juan does not hold back her criticism of the oppressive, suffocating extended family. Not in her new film, The Summer Side (Del Otro Lado Del Verano), which screens at O Cinema Miami Shores tonight, nor in real life. The film, San Juan’s second feature, follows an…

American Hustle, directed and co-written by David O. Russell, is undeniably the must-watch film this holiday season. With outstanding performances by an A-list cast (Amy Adams, Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, and Jennifer Lawrence), the period film is loosely based on the real-life Abscam FBI Sting during the late-1970s. It’s a…

Joaquin Phoenix in Her.On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, this paper’s film critics talk about Spike Jonze’s Her and Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, in addition to the wave of films all coming out before the year’s over. Listen to it on iTunes or below on Soundcloud:…

Folk music is supposed to be the music of the people. Yet at the heart of Joel and Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis, set in New York in the winter of 1961, is a folksinger with no feeling for people. Llewyn Davis, played by Oscar Isaac, is a broke, rumpled…

Three types of artists hinge on authenticity: punk bands, folk singers, and rappers. Actors, like Oscar Isaac, are by definition phonies. But the star of the Joel and Ethan Coen’s new film, Inside Llewyn Davis, gets that pressure to keep it real. In high school, he was a straight-edge punk…

How stubborn was Walt Disney? He spent 26 years wheedling Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers to sell him the film rights to her book — call it determination or bullying. Travers thought he was a hack who would louse up her story with cartoon penguins. Walt thought she was a…

The best movies about con artists work a bit of flimflammery themselves. They’re not necessarily dishonest; they just can’t resist making the truth shinier than it is in real life. There may not be much behind the sparkling tinsel curtain of David O. Russell’s extraordinarily entertaining American Hustle. But what…

The audience that shows up for a comedy is the most tyrannical of all. Its very presence is the equivalent of a schoolyard bully’s challenge: “Go ahead — make me laugh.” Which is why there’s danger in following up a hit comedy with a sequel, even nine years after the…