Masculinity is reasserted and order restored in the Sam Rockwell and Olivia Wilde dramedy Better Living Through Chemistry, which could be subtitled “How Douglas Got His Dick Back.” Writer-directors Geoff Moore and David Posamentier’s droll, unsatisfying film — about a henpecked suburban pharmacist (Rockwell) who learns to become a man…
As of this writing, the Netflix Instant catalog boasts more than 10,000 titles available for online streaming a number that, as per the official Netflix rhetoric, seems colossal. But the landscape of this digital paradise may not be quite so idyllic. As classic film enthusiast Jaime Christley reminds us,…
It doesn’t feature iPhones, Twitter, or an internet, and yet Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop remains perhaps the most prescient sci-fi effort of the past 30 years — a work from 1987 whose continuing relevance is matched by the fact that no one would dare make it today. Or, at least, remake…
“Sex films sell, and other stuff doesn’t . . . or at least not nearly as well,” says film preservationist Joe Rubin. Rubin, 24 years old, is one of the creators working Skinaflix, a VOD-style streaming video service he calls “the Netflix of porn.” At Vinegar Syndrome, a separate DVD/Blu-Ray–centric…
(Spoiler alert: The following piece discusses up to the February 16 episode of Looking.)HBO’s Looking has had a tough time winning over its intended fans. Upon its premiere, Gawker’s Rich Juzwiak yawningly summed up the political achievement of creator Michael Lannan’s wonderful half-hour dramedy about three homosexual men in San…
A wise man — or, more precisely, a wiseass trucker named Jack Burton — once opined that “it’s all in the reflexes.” Few actors have had better ones than Kurt Russell, who makes a welcome return to theaters this weekend in The Art of the Steal. Having been largely MIA…
Every once in a while, a terrific small-budget indie comes along and nobody even blinks. Adult World, directed by Scott Coffey (known mostly as an actor, particularly for his roles in David Lynch movies like Mulholland Dr. and Lost Highway) and written by Andy Cochran, could easily get lost in…
First, let’s get this out of the way: There is no Santa Claus. Now, on to a perhaps even harsher truth: There are certain indications that Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, whose 17th-century paintings — like Girl With a Pearl Earring and The Music Lesson — show an extraordinarily delicate touch…
Man, woman, gay, straight, bi: There’s something for everyone in 300: Rise of an Empire, the XXL sequel to the also-larger-than-life Greeks-in-shinguards extravaganza 300. In that picture, directed by Zack Snyder and based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel about the three-day Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C., the Spartans and…
In 1998, Douglas Adams published a sweet, funny essay called “Riding the Rays,” about an excursion to Hayman Island to try a kind of underwater Jet Ski called a Sub Bug because it afforded an opportunity to swim with manta rays. And manta rays are cool. He wrote of his…
Action heroes with nothing to lose are the best kind, perhaps the only kind worth watching. In the opening seconds of Jaume Collet-Serra’s Non-Stop, Liam Neeson’s federal air marshal Bill Marks slumps in his parked vehicle while sloshing a few glugs of whiskey into a paper cup and stirring it…
Created for German television, where it debuted last spring, the World War II epic Our Mothers, Our Fathers has since aired on Polish, Irish, and Swedish networks and now finds its way to a theatrical release, retitled Generation War for American audiences. Conceived and undertaken, in the words of producer…
When we first meet the hero of Son of God, a kind of chintzy melodrama about the horrors of capital punishment, he’s approaching a fisherman with a classic boiler-room pitch: “Just give me an hour, and I will give you a whole new life,” Jesus (Diogo Morgado) promises Peter (Darwin…
For more than two decades, Alain Guiraudie has been unrivaled in depicting desires that upend convention, whether homo or hetero. In the comedy The King of Escape (2009), for instance, a middle-aged gay man falls in love with a 16-year-old girl; the film ends with an all-male gerontophilic ménage à…
Almost a pop history of Western culture’s relationship to female orgasm, Charlie Stratton’s In Secret is a spirited zip through Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, a sex-and-sin morality tale of the sort that has been the template for the past decade of Woody Allen dramas. Unlike those, In Secret boasts vigor…
Here’s the last thing I ever would have expected out of Pompeii, that sword-thrust of 3D gladiator-vs.-volcano madness coming right at your disbelieving eyeholes. An hour or so in, when Vesuvius exhausts its portentous rumblings and blows its top (3D!), I legitimately wasn’t ready. Yes, all that third-act destruction is…
No matter what else he does, director Sam Raimi has two unassailable fan favorites under his belt: 1987’s Evil Dead 2, and the 1992 trilogy-capper Army of Darkness. (His first film, 1981’s The Evil Dead, is more “respected” than “loved” by the fans.) Released between those two films, Raimi’s 1990…
In 1990, the same year that Kevin Costner released the massive global hit Dances with Wolves, a curious thing happened in France. The name Kevin became the country’s most popular for new babies, a Gaelic moniker edging out national stalwarts like Antoine and Jules. Imagine if everyone in America suddenly…
We’ve entered an age in which people have no idea how old they are. Fifty-year-olds lament “I still feel 30 in my mind” and sometimes dress like it. Some 30-year-olds may cling to the destructive habits of their 20s, but plenty more march dutifully into full-on family- and career-building mode,…
Goodbye, Facebook. Goodbye, iPhone. Hello, Saint Vladimir’s,” dropout Rose Hathaway (Zoey Deutch) groans when she and her best friend, Lissa (Lucy Fry), are dragged back to the titular school they ditched when they ran away to live normalish lives in Portland. Despite their year outside the gates, human culture remains…
Congratulations, Detroit. In 1987, Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop cemented it as the most violent city in the world, an honor the Motor City resented for decades until its powers that be realized they may as well erect a statue of Peter Weller and milk the tourism. Twenty-seven years later, the attention…
The big news out of the Berlin Film Festival was that Shia LaBeouf, here to promote Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac: Volume 1, behaved like an ass on the red carpet at the movie’s premiere last night. He showed up in a proper tuxedo, but also with a paper bag over…
