It’s been 32 years since the release of National Lampoon’s Vacation, in which Chevy Chase, as dad Clark Griswold, packed his Griswold clan into what looked like a Country Squire from Hell and sought the family-bonding experienceTM by driving cross-country to a mythical mega — amusement park known as Walley…
Anecdote #1: Chris Farley made a habit of pouncing on Mike Myers — at the same exact time each week — during the early- to mid-1990s era in which the two starred on Saturday Night Live. The elfin Myers deliberately took showers at a fixed, quiet time, but each week,…
How much time would you like to spend in the company of benignly kooky hobbyists? That’s the question to ask before committing to docu-commercial A Lego Brickumentary, a largely genial but frequently wearying feature-length toy ad. The film’s central conceit is sound enough: Lego construction kits “unlock [users’] imagination,” in…
At 53, Tom Cruise is past the retirement age of every James Bond except Roger Moore. Yet not only does his 19-year-old Mission: Impossible series tick on, counting down the seconds till its next explosion, but Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is also determined to unman his cross-Atlantic competition. Forget high-tech gadgets…
The pizza joint Shakey’s in Hollywood is packed when transgender actresses Mya Taylor and Kiki Rodriguez slide into a booth with their director Sean Baker, whose shot-on-location-and-on-iPhone comedy Tangerine was the most talked-about surprise of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Taylor, the quieter and more glamorously aloof of the pair…
Here’s a shocker: In Pixels, his latest, Adam Sandler plays a stunted man-child who turns out to be very, very special. That’s his ecological niche: the Manic Potbellied Dream Dork, or, if you prefer, the fragile Sand-Man. Sandler films have predictable scripts: In two hours or less, he’ll transform from…
The opening of Antoine Fuqua’s Southpaw, shot in gritty, grayed-out tones, is a grim harbinger: A fighter getting ready for the ring holds up his meaty paws for the ritualistic wrapping of gauze and tape. His gloves are slipped over the wrappings, and then they’re taped on too — but…
“Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow,” Stephen Dedalus declared in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In the case of Jimmy Gralton, she took bites and spat him out a couple of times. It’s tempting to say some people never learn, but, as played…
Whiskery and restless, grooving and grotesque, the documentarian Les Blank’s long suppressed film A Poem Is a Naked Person plays like your memories of some mad, stoned last century summer. Commissioned by the boogie-woogie piano bluesman Leon Russell, who is more this roaming doc’s fitful center of gravity than its…
We may not need another hero, but true believers don’t need to shrink-ray their expectations. Ant-Man is the first Marvel film — and the first of this summer’s pixels-go-kablooey time-wasters — to get better as it goes. The filmmakers save their biggest, wiggiest ideas for the climaxes, where they wittily…
There’s no reverie Alonso Ruizpalacios’ Güeros can’t shatter, no presumed truth it can’t complicate, no expectation of closure it won’t dash. Set in Mexico City during 1999’s 292-day student strike at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, the film is about — if any one thing — proximity to decisiveness,…
Above all else, a movie built around a star promises presence, and in Bill Condon’s Mr. Holmes, that promise is dual: Here are 104 minutes with the great Ian McKellen, for once not casting spells, controlling magnetism, or classing up script pages of expositional gobbledygook. It’s not his job, this…
The problem with clamoring for more woman-led comedies is that actual comedy may be the thing that ends up being left by the wayside. Tina Fey, among others, has railed against the boneheaded dictum that women can’t be funny. But in the current climate of watchfulness — one in which…
Imagine Donald Trump wanted to reboot his disastrous presidential campaign announcement month to start over as a younger man with real hair. In Tarsem Singh’s Self/less, Trump could hire the medical geniuses of Phoenix Biogenic to transfer his aging brain into a strapping hot bod for $250 million — the…
Hollywood lives by the simple, sad axiom “Where there’s money, there’s more money,” which is how we get remakes of movies that sometimes shouldn’t have been made in the first place, two Spider-Man reboots within five years, and a Star Wars franchise that ensures our children’s children will revere George…
The death of Amy Winehouse, in July 2011, at age 27, was one of the first great tragedies of 21st-century pop music, an event — like the deaths of Tupac Shakur and Kurt Cobain in the last decade of the 20th — that emphasized the jarring contrast between the fragility…
There’s no one right way to show mental illness in the movies, yet there are hundreds of ways to get it wrong. Even though certain disorders come with specific traits, a diagnosis is not a human being, and doomed is the actor who just cycles through symptoms, rather than working…
Crystal Moselle’s documentary The Wolfpack is a Manhattan fable about fear. Two decades ago, a Hare Krishna, conspiracy theorist, and self-described god named Oscar Angulo moved from Peru to a public housing tenement on the Lower East Side with his American bride, Susanne, whom he’d met and wooed on the…
After twelve years on the air, The Daily Show With Jon Stewart became required viewing during the Dubya years, when much of the nation was desperate to look to almost anyone else for political leadership. The Comedy Central series offered nightly catharsis in five- or eight-minute bursts, voicing the anger…
The upcoming Amy Winehouse documentary Amy is one of the best music docs Village Voice film critic Stephanie Zacharek has ever seen, and she explains why to Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl and LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson this week. Also this week: The confusing (yet really, really enjoyable)…
Five films into the franchise, Terminator: Genisys feels like a VHS cassette that’s been rewound and recorded over for 21 years. Director Alan Taylor (of the unmemorable Thor: The Dark World) gives us images — a thumbs-up, an abandoned factory, a liquid-metal cop smashing through the windshield of a car…
Steven Soderbergh’s 2012 Magic Mike was a cocktease. The ads tempted audiences with sweaty chests and thrusting crotches, but after Soderbergh lured us in to his all-male strip club, he turned on the lights to show us the squalor. His hunks were drugged and morally decayed. The women — the…
