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…
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…
In Spike Jonze’s new sci-fi romance, Her, Joaquin Phoenix plays a divorcée 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Elves snore, it turns out. Their maidens make teensy-peen jokes and pine for the hottest of dwarfs. And Bilbo Baggins, so concerned about his doilies just three hours of screen time ago, now punches his sword right through the trachea of a goblin — and then looks rather proud of…
The late Paul Walker practiced the kind of manly American acting that often doesn’t look like acting at all. In movie after movie, many of them of the fast and/or furious variety, Walker performed the difficult trick of seeming to really be the apple-pie tough guys he played. In those…
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…
Someday there will be a serious academic study on Tyler Perry, the battered and sexually abused child who legally changed his first name at 16 to distance himself from his estranged father and grew rich playing a caricature of his mother in pantyhose and a dress, like a sass-talking Norman…
Blending cliché-prone genres — disease-of-the-week tearjerker, marital melodrama, musical — into an unwieldy but distinctive hybrid, Belgian director Felix van Groeningen’s The Broken Circle Breakdown holds you even as it flies off the tracks. The Flemish-language film revolves around banjo player Didier (Johan Heldenbergh) and tattoo artist Elise (Veerle Baetens),…
Some movies come barreling out of their caves like armies on the sociocultural warpath, self-consciously defining themselves as psychographic events, marking The Way Things Are Now and becoming part of history in the process. Given the ambition, we should embrace these rare explosions when they happen, even more so now…
The big problem with pinup queen Bettie Page — maybe the only problem — is that her image inspires so many easy bromides about how she made sex seem fun and playful and how she’s a great role model for modern women who want to feel comfortable with their sexuality…
A favorite pastime of those who love Asian film is to carp about Hollywood’s annoying tendency to lay claim to and defile their favorites. But Spike Lee’s Oldboy is the remake that came too late, so benign and unmemorable that not even people who loved Park Chan-wook’s 2003 original will…
Once upon a time — the 1980s — you could walk into a movie theater any day of the year, plop down a few bucks, and watch one man kick another man’s ass. Not every action flick was great, but most were good enough, the film equivalent of pizza. Back…
Once, in the middle of the 2004 Tour de France bicycling race, the nine-man American team, led by Lance Armstrong, pretended that their bus had broken down en route to their hotel. As fans and the international press stood outside, cheering and taking pictures, the team, hidden behind high, tinted…
It says something that two of the biggest sensations in young adult literature over the past ten years have featured heroines who keep more than one guy on the line at a time. No longer do the genre’s bright young women sit around waiting for one Mr. Right to notice…
It had to happen: There’s so much voice-over narration in today’s movies, so much needless verbal play-by-play, that it was only a matter of time before somebody made a picture narrated by that life of the party himself, Death. The Grim Reaper delivers the opening monologue of The Book Thief,…
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…
Imagine an alternate history for Vince Vaughn. What if, 18 years ago, instead of rehearsing Swingers during the day and sampling Los Angeles’ starlets at night, he channeled his sexual energy into masturbating for cash at a sperm bank? He could have become Delivery Man’s David Wozniak, father of 533…
