An ostensibly feel-good French-Canadian comedy about artificial insemination gone awry, Ken Scott’s Starbuck mainly makes you feel like taking a shower. The protagonist is a hapless 40-year-old Montreal bachelor named David (Patrick Huard), whose life is turned upside down when he learns that his sperm-donating spree 20 years ago has…
A common sentiment recurs through the abundance of eulogies and obituaries penned by film critics in the wake of his death late last week: Roger Ebert was an inspiration. It’s easy enough to be encouraged by another’s success—to regard an esteemed elder colleague with a combination of admiration and envy—but…
Unlike many fledgling web series that use broad comedic strokes to up the laughs per second, faux-vlogging gem My Bastard Son combines the naturalistic acting of shows like The Office with absurd circumstances and very specific characters. The grainy, five-minute video shows James Urbaniak (American Splendor) trying to connect with…
Thanks to her otherworldly cuteness, wide-eyed “perma-kitten” Lil Bub is the Internet’s favorite celebri-kitty. Her bright green eyes sparkle with perpetual wonder, and her little pink tongue sticks out beneath an upper lip that’s always smiling. She’s also polydactyl — meaning she has thumbs. When her human, Mike Bridavsky, needs…
By Mad Men’s fifth season, Betty Draper had walked out of our lives, and a much plumper Betty Francis had waddled in. The audience response to this swollen version of a once-slender character: a collective cringe. Suddenly Betty became a joke. In no time, a parody of Ram Jam’s “Black…
A film festival shouldn’t be the cultural equivalent of a speakeasy, with only people “in the know” aware of its existence. But for the Palm Beach International Film Festival (PBIFF), that’s the way it seemed this year: Just two weeks before the fest was set to begin, its website still…
For a guy who has spent a lot of time planning how to brutally murder people in the woods, the most shocking thing about Fede Alvarez is his well-adjusted nature. As the co-writer and director of Evil Dead (in theaters Friday, April 5), the new remake of the 1981 gore…
“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…
Again and again, movies show you killing, but it’s one in a thousand on-screen killings that might get you to feel something of what killing is actually like. The same goes for fucking, but there, the numbers are worse: Whether it’s Hollywood’s quick-cut, nothing-below-the-waist bedroom montages or the mechanized chug…
Hannah Arendt coined banality of evil while watching Nazis on trial, and Canadian writer/director Kim Nguyen’s War Witch inspires a phrase that doesn’t rhyme but might be adjacent: the abruptness of atrocity. In War Witch, a kid playing with a wooden beam one moment might be forced to kill her…
Adolescent angst is mostly insufferable to almost anyone past voting age, and the rebirth of the musical drama, where feelings are condensed into manipulative pop, hasn’t helped. Hunky Dory, the latest from Billy Elliott producer Jonathan Finn, is what results when somebody decides — after Glee, Rock of Ages, and…
Poor Elliot Gould. The once venerable actor has been reduced to playing nothing but crotchety old men — and, in the case of Brad Leong’s Dorfman in Love, homophobic ones at that. Gould’s obsessively grieving widower does loosen up as the film goes on, and he plays only a supporting…
Like the blood that gushes forth from the elevators of the Overlook Hotel, brilliant/ridiculous theories of what Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is really about have for years surged madly and memorably — especially online, where the internet’s dead-ends, blind links, and back-where-you-started arguments just might be another part of the…
What must Bruce Willis have felt when he discovered that his seven or so minutes of G.I. Joe: Retaliation screen time offer much more agreeable Bruce Willis-ness than the entirety of A Good Day to Die Hard? Or that his cameo, shot two years ago and rich with quips and…
Puberty is sex and sex is murder in Stoker, a Hitchcockian stew of hothouse familial jealousy, sadism, and psychosis all tied together by one teenaged girl’s homicidal coming of age. Psychosexual imagery permeates every inch of renowned South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook’s stateside debut. A blood-tipped pencil or water dripping…
Spring Breakers’ provocative director on the darkness beneath college partiers’ booze, boobs, and bad decisions. To most of the world, spring break seems like a lot of fun, but people who live in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, or South Padre Island understand the dark side. Damn college kids pass through for…
Abbas Kiarostami is preoccupied with my tape recorder. He wonders if it’s too far away from where he’s sitting. He makes his translator switch from one side of him to another so that the recorder is between them. After a while, clearly still anxious about, he picks it up and…
“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” So goes the adage from John Ford’s 1962 classic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and so it has gone for Heaven’s Gate, the class-war Western written and directed by one of Ford’s truest disciples among contemporary…
For a movie as much in love with New York’s outer-borough street life as Adam Leon’s Gimme the Loot, it will not do just to talk about the film. That’s what Leon insists, and so I find myself heading north with Leon on FDR Drive on an overcast Friday afternoon,…
Best known as a 40-year veteran of the indie distribution scene, Jeff Lipsky has latterly carved out a sideline as one of New York’s most idiosyncratic indie filmmakers — a purveyor of confessional, sexually frank relationship dramas clearly indebted to his acknowledged masters: Mike Leigh and John Cassavetes. The best…
Love him or hate him, Ed Koch was New York in the 1980s, and Koch’s bio account of his mayoral tenure offers almost equal measures of celebration and censure. Director Neil Barsky’s film never shies away from Koch’s controversies, exploring his third term’s devastating corruption scandal and giving voice to…
Steve Carell’s gift is for men who might drown in their own obliviousness. Like his Daily Show reporter or The Office’s Michael Scott, his 40-year-old virgin lived in terror that someone might catch on to the fact that he knows nothing about subjects he purports to have mastered. When his…
