I. First, Something About the Badges (Then We’ll Get to the Coens) Someday I’m going to write a song and call it “Ballad of the Blue Badge.” I haven’t figured out a rhyme scheme yet, let alone a melody, so please allow this outline to suffice: At Cannes, the color…
In Arnaud Desplechin’s English-language Jimmy P. (Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian), Benicio Del Toro—freed at last from the tyranny of playing bit-part heavies in American thrillers and action movies—is James Picard, a Blackfoot Indian who has lost his way in post-World War II America. He’s a veteran, but he’s treated…
Ladies and gentlemen—anyone, really, who cares about his or her mug—step right up. According to a bit of advice proffered in one of the festival editions of The Hollywood Reporter a few days back, the beauty product to buy while in Cannes is Avibon, an “only-in-France aging cream.” If sun…
There’s one key truth that separates the tank-topped gearheads of the Fast & Furious movies from the rest of us. Every problem these lugnuts face can be solved by doing the one thing these lugnuts love most: driving really fast. It’s like if you could deal with your taxes by…
Justin Lin may strike some as out of place in the pantheon of contemporary auteurs. The Taiwanese-born American filmmaker, best known for having directed Fast Five and its sequel, Fast & Furious 6, makes unabashedly populist blockbusters for mainstream audiences—hardly the purview of a “serious” artist. His films, wafer thin…
“Who are you?” pleads a doomed man as Benedict Cumberbatch looms into his first close-up in Star Trek Into Darkness. The answer is Khan. And that’s not a spoiler — it’s a selling point. A less secretive director (i.e., all save the ghost of Stanley Kubrick) would trumpet that his…
Responding to the uproar earlier this month over the passage—and President Obama’s signage—of the so-called “Monsanto Protection Act,” the gene-bending agri-giant Monsanto issued a press release dismissing any attendant conspiracy theories as “worthy of a B-grade movie script.” They got it half right. Immediate in its politics yet Shakespearean in…
“Can you speak up a little, man? I dove off a boat yesterday, and I now have an immense amount of water in my ear!” Brady Corbet, 24, is on the phone from the Republic of Panama, where he’s filming a new movie opposite Benicio del Toro and Josh Hutcherson…
“It was 1991. I fly into L.A. I take a cab to Compton. On the phone, Richard [Williams] said, ‘The only thing I guarantee you, you won’t get shot,’ ” says tennis coach Rick Macci. “I thought he was kidding.” Macci was meeting with Williams and his two young daughters,…
Until his arrest in 1986, most people believed Richard Kuklinski to be an all-American family man. In reality, this suburban New Jersey “banker” made his fortune working as a hit man for the Mafia, killing more than 100 people and often freezing and dismembering their bodies to obscure the time…
Recently, African-American-directed relationship movies have hewed toward either incongruous absurdity (Think Like a Man), overt sentimentality (Jumping the Broom), or, in Tyler Perry’s work, both. Long gone feel the days of complex films like Two Can Play That Game, Mark Brown’s modern screwball comedy that provided hilarity alongside a clear-eyed…
Writer-director Ramin Bahrani’s At Any Price finds tension between rapacious capitalism and the idealized fiction of rural life in farming communities, especially as they engage in decidedly unpastoral, commodity-based feeding frenzies. Here it’s not bad weather or greedy banks that places a large, third-generation family farm in jeopardy but the…
In the same way novels can be better and worse than journalism at processing history, so can movies be better and worse than novels: too unreal yet too specific. For the movie of Mohsin Hamid’s novel, director Mira Nair mounts a sensitive retrospective procedural of radicalization: Here’s how a bright…
Uwe Boll will no longer fight you — at least, not with his fists. Often lambasted by critics as the worst of the worst, Boll once literally got into the boxing ring with four film bloggers, but these days prefers to combat negative press with what he claims are more…
There’s a scene in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby in which Leonardo DiCaprio’s hyperrich, superawkward Jay Gatsby takes it upon himself to redecorate the bachelor pad of his less-prosperous friend, Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire). Gatsby’s old flame, Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan), is coming to Nick’s house for tea. Eager to…
Would you sign on for three months in shark-infested waters on a tippy raft under a captain who can’t swim? The shrewdest joke in Kon-Tiki’s surefire story — about Thor Heyerdahl’s 4,000-mile South Pacific expedition to prove that ocean-faring Incans could have settled Tahiti — is that practically every character…
Over the course of its first 60 minutes, Ken Loach’s The Angels’ Share proves a testament to its director’s enduring reputation as a master of British cinema and the social realist form, articulating the frustrations of Glasgow’s working class with clarity and sophistication. Robbie (nonactor Paul Brannigan) is a brash…
A self-referential, insider farce about the hunger for Hollywood stardom, He’s Way More Famous Than You is — like its leading lady — as unhinged as it is hilarious. Still clinging to the fact that years earlier, she costarred in The Squid and the Whale, Halley Feiffer (as herself) aims…
Stephanie Zacharek is the new chief film critic at the Village Voice. Alan Scherstuhl is the Voice’s film editor. Sometimes they gab about how the review-sausage gets made. To: Stephanie Zacharek From: Alan Scherstuhl Hi, Stephanie, welcome again to the Voice! Like you, I found myself worn out by Iron…
Iron Man 3 opens this week. For some viewers the film’s appeal isn’t the eponymous superhero, but the sarcastic-yet-sensitive hero behind the gravity-defying, repulsor-ray-shooting suit of armor. I refer, of course, to Shane Black. Iron Man 3’s co-writer–director recharged the buddy-cop flick in the ’80s with his screenplay for Lethal…
Where has Robert Downey Jr. gone? There’s no doubt he’s the star of Iron Man 3; he sprints through the picture like a neurotic panther. Yet he’s absent, detached in a Zen-like way from the whole affair. The nakedness that defines his best performances — in any role, up to…
Responding to the uproar earlier this month over the passage—and President Obama’s signage—of the so-called “Monsanto Protection Act,” the gene-bending agri-giant Monsanto issued a press release dismissing any attendant conspiracy theories as “worthy of a B-grade movie script.” They got it half right. Immediate in its politics yet Shakespearean in…
