Despite some reluctance, Wes Craven is a name-brand filmmaker. The phrase “Wes Craven Presents” comes with certain expectations thanks to the financial success of the Scream franchise and The Hills Have Eyes series before that. But what cemented Craven’s reputation is A Nightmare on Elm Street, a deathless cycle of…
A tale of love complicated — if not thwarted — by prior responsibilities, intractable barriers, and the rigid high-society norms that frustrate its Victorian characters’ attempts to live as they so desperately want, The Invisible Woman finds Ralph Fiennes proving as adept behind the camera as he is in front…
“You are the man?” a crook asks Ice Cube as the cop comedy Ride Along opens. “I am the man!” Cube insists. You can’t blame him for being defensive. Now a 44-year-old father of five, Cube is three decades away from the furious teenager who cofounded NWA his senior year…
Russians still make the best movie villains. Since 9/11, Hollywood has been queasy about giving us fictional baddies from Arab countries — the line between cheap stereotypes and real-life religious extremism is too blurry, too delicate. South American drug lords have had their day, and Albanians in bad sweaters just…
January! Just the time to snuggle up with a 3-D sword-and-pectoral extravaganza. And although some of its more imaginative plot details would make Edith Hamilton blanch, Renny Harlin’s The Legend of Hercules fulfills every silly, flimsy promise it makes in the first place: There are lots of battles (though rather…
Kristen Stewart spent five Twilight films getting rescued by werewolves and vampires. Consider Camp X-Ray her rebuttal to a half-decade of playing damsels in distress. As Guantanamo guard Private Cole, Stewart is punched, bloodied, and spat on — and that’s just the first 10 minutes. When her commanding officer jokes,…
Pamela Smart, the sexpot schoolteacher who seduced three teenage boys to shoot her husband, has been imprisoned without parole since 1991. Her official release year is sometime in 9999, assuming that human civilization is still alive. Yet the captive in Jeremiah Zagar’s Captivated: The Trials of Pamela Smart isn’t her…
Sixty years ago, Fred Flintstone hawked Winston cigarettes. Today, he pitches cereal. And both can kill. Stephanie Soechtig’s rabble-rousing documentary Fed Up argues that it’s time to attack Big Sugar just like we successfully demonized Big Tobacco. Narrated by Katie Couric, Fed Up is the first doc of Sundance to…
Without big truth-telling scenes, grand, great-lady, Meryl Streep-type actors would be out of work. Hell, Meryl Streep would be out of work. But for now, at least, August: Osage County, John Wells’ film adaptation of Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway hit, keeps her out of the bread line. Streep plays…
Here’s a movie that’ll flop in Kabul. Lone Survivor, the latest by Battleship director Peter Berg, is a jingoistic snuff film about a Navy SEAL squadron outgunned by the Taliban in the mountainous Kunar province. After four soldiers — played with muscles and machismo by Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Emile…
Written and directed by Spike Jonze. Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson, and Amy Adams. 120 minutes. Rated R.The terrible reality of modern life is that even beautiful young people on a first date can’t go a whole evening without checking their phones. Just allowing the present to happen has become…
Rosemary’s Baby notwithstanding, it’s usually only white suburban people who fall prey to movie ghosts and demons — they’re always the ones opening doors to rooms that shouldn’t be entered, stepping witlessly into pentagrams painted on the floor in goat’s blood, and wondering aloud, “You think this is some sort…
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…
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 are 10 films you won’t want to miss in 2014. 1. Adieu au language (Directed by Jean-Luc Godard) Jean-Luc Godard, master of the French Nouvelle…
Toasting computer love, a genocide musical, and a Midwestern odyssey – [Or: “The Best of 2013: Take Two” or something if you’re running both Amy’s and Stephanie’s lists] I could write a Shakespearean sonnet about each film on my Top 10 of 2013, but we know we’re all here 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…
When he was 13, Marilyn Manson — then just Christian schoolkid Brian Warner of Canton, Ohio — would hide out in the basement while his grandfather masturbated to bestiality porn. Then he’d go upstairs and cheer himself up by reading Mad magazine. The self-dubbed God of Fuck — who later…
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…
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…
