“There’s some definite movement in the yard!” If you imagine that line spoken by the pimply, squeaky-voiced teen who works every drive-thru on The Simpsons, you get some sense of the awkward confrontation that director Cullen Hoback has with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg during the riveting climax of his death-of-privacy…
“When Beeswax came out in 2009, I felt like there was a sense in the world of, ‘Well, that’s another one of the same from him,'” writer-director Andrew Bujalski says by telephone. “That frustrated me. I wanted to shake everybody by the collar and say, ‘No, can’t you see that…
Mademoiselle C Dethrones the “Muse” Title of Former French Vogue Editor
We’ll always have Iron Man, they must be telling each other in Hollywood. As summer wanes, the hulking corpses of would-be blockbusters litter the home-video distribution channels like fallen Kaiju from Guillermo Del Toro’s giant-‘bots-vs.-giant-beasts movie Pacific Rim, the most enjoyable of 2013’s many urban-renewing summer blockbusters. In Del Toro’s…
Understandably, Peter Mayhew is not as well-known as Harrison Ford or Mark Hamill. But W. Ryan Ziegler wants to change that. The first-time filmmaker is now raising money on Kickstarter for Standing in the Stars: The Peter Mayhew Story, a documentary about the 7-foot-3 actor who played Chewbacca in the…
Insidious Chapter 2 picks up where its predecessor left off — in abject silliness. As before, director James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell’s wannabe-scary story indulges in innumerable demonic-possession tropes before closing with a ridiculous finale set on an “astral plane” known as “The Further” where evil spirits lurk. That’s…
Brian De Palma had a good reason for remaking the erotic French thriller Love Crime: He could do it better. “I think it’s very dangerous to remake a classic,” says De Palma. “Leave it alone.” But the 2010 corporate cat fight flick about two female frenemies had a framework he…
Historians remember 1973 as an exciting time for fans of government overthrows (coup-noisseurs, if you will), with leaders toppling in Afghanistan, Uruguay, Thailand and Chile that year. On Friday, those coup-noisseurs can think about Chile by “Dancing on Pinochet’s Grave” at Sweat Records. In 1973, the elected socialist president Salvador…
Summer 2013 was a strong season for that oft-maligned genre, the romantic comedy. Excellent films like The Spectacular Now and Drinking Buddies for the most part avoided rom-com cliches, and reinventions like Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing made timeless story lines seem fresh. Still other on-screen romances were held…
In Hollywood, they say if you don’t see movies or roles out there that properly represent you, write them yourself. That’s what filmmaker Cess Silvera did with his latest film, Overtown, which is set to film in Miami this month. Silvera, whose previous work includes Shottas (2002) and G.E.D. (2009),…
Last week, Dexter took the night off for Labor Day. (Hey, it’s the last weekend you can wear white — and no color better showcases a splatter of blood.) So when things got back on track last night, we were hoping for a more suspenseful episode. But no luck. While…
Whether or not we like to admit it, we all dream about fashion. Sure, some dreams are more like nightmares. (Think Ed Hardy, Crocs, and trucker hats.) But either way, fashion (or lack thereof) is present in all of our lives. It’s walking down the street. It’s in that really…
It’s 8:20 and you’re in the breakfast room at your hotel, having your customary bowl of muesli. By 9:20, you’re watching a spurned wife cut off her teenage son’s penis–and eat it–as retribution for her husband’s infidelity. Ah, Tuesday. But wow, Kim Ki-duk’s Moebius is some movie! If you have…
The Blue Starlite Miami Urban Drive-In, a boutique drive-in movie theater that announced it was headed to Wynwood in July, has at last set an opening date — and it’s just in time for cooler fall weather. In a statement released yesterday, the Blue Starlite announced it’ll officially open Wednesday,…
There is a moment of silent incompatibility in Joe Swanberg’s Drinking Buddies that illuminates the entirety of a relationship in a single request. As the lovely, earthy Kate (Olivia Wilde) reclines suggestively on a couch in his tasteful apartment, Chris (Ron Livingston), her gently fussy boyfriend, politely reminds her to…
Richard B. Riddick — Dick to his friends, if he had any — is an intergalactic meathead who has glowered through three movies, two videogames, and a cartoon. He’s both the luckiest and unluckiest man alive: lucky because he’s impossible to kill, unlucky because everyone keeps trying. In the near-silent…
Cinema deserves rich stories and positive portrayals of Latino life, but director Fro Roja’s cheapjack family dramedy — about a middle-aged Washington Heights bachelor unequipped to suddenly care for six children — doesn’t try to be anything more than a soft-serve pull of treacly pandering. Writer and coproducer Joey Dedio…
Strip Catholic teaching bare, remove its overarching story, its context, its reaching toward God at the expense of man, and you have a dime-store horror novel chronicling ghastly deaths — of, say, Saint Stephen (stoned to death) or Saint Maria Goretti (stabbed 14 times by her attempted rapist). Add to…
Bounty Killer feels like the adaptation of a videogame that doesn’t exist. Inspired by the likes of Mad Max (movie) and Fallout (game), it tells of a desert dystopia in which soldiers of fortune are paid handsomely to knock off the corporate goons responsible for the world’s sad state, with…
“Imagine if Memento met Pulp Fiction in the neon-lit Miami of the 1980s.” That’s the vision for director Saman Kesh’s short film based on Hotline Miami, the ultra-violent and super retro video game that debuted at the end of last year. Kesh isn’t just any indie filmmaker; his past work…
All manner of spoilers below. Nearly anyone with a grievance against America’s dysfunctional prison system can find a scene to illustrate their protest in the first season of Orange Is the New Black, Netflix’s women-behind-bars dramedy. Admittedly, the wonkiest or most disheartening issues, like prison privatization or endemic sexual assault,…
In 1953, the Venice Film Festival jury didn’t award its top prize, the Golden Lion. Instead, it made the highly unorthodox decision to award the second-place prize, the Silver Lion, to six films, among them I Vitelloni and Ugetsu. How did I know this? To celebrate the festival’s 70th edition,…
