You can guess the plot of Disney’s Planes — it’s just Cars 2 with wings, an international romp that pits a humble country bumpkin against a fleet of literally jet-setting competitors in a race around the world. With pit stops in four continents, more cultural stereotypes than the Eurovision song…
This article contains major spoilers. A white suburban teen, urged on by friends, makes the decision to finally get laid, maybe by the end of summer. That’s the premise of Sixteen Candles, American Pie, Superbad, and now The To Do List. Comedy pin-up Aubrey Plaza gives a characteristically low-wattage performance…
When David Gordon Green introduced Paul Rudd to Emile Hirsch, the two actors didn’t click. It was an awkward seafood dinner. “Emile just started talking about something — girls, maybe — and I was doing a piss-poor job of trying to follow along,” recalls Rudd. “And when Emile got up…
Here’s something you would think we could all agree on: Rigid parts of the body probably shouldn’t go slack. But try asking a SeaWorld spokesperson about the drooping dorsal fins on so many of the park chain’s performing male orca, about that mighty Alfalfa spike that in the wild juts…
Here’s a humble wig-out, a curio that could endure beyond its creators’ more demonstrably successful works — and for decades will certainly confound audiences who think they’re streaming/torrenting/eye-jacking some broad Paul Rudd comedy they had forgotten about. Prince Avalanche director David Gordon Green gives star Rudd more chances to charm…
In the early hours of New Year’s Day 2009, on a platform of Oakland’s Fruitvale Bay Area Rapid Transit Station, a young man named Oscar Grant III was shot in the back by a BART transit officer. The officer later claimed that he meant to reach for his Taser and…
It’s no secret around these parts that my guilty pleasure — okay fine, one of my guilty pleasures — is watching ABC’s The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. Religiously. So when I say that this season, starring Desiree Hartsock, is so bad that you couldn’t even pay me to watch the…
For anyone who’s been going to the movies at all regularly over the past 45 years, Woody Allen is practically family. His movies may draw fewer passionate responses than they did in the ’70s and ’80s, but we still feel compelled to reckon with him. Whenever Allen comes out with…
More terrifying than any horror film, and more intellectually adventurous than just about any 2013 release so far, The Act of Killing is a major achievement, a work about genocide that rightly earns its place alongside Shoah as a supreme testament to the cinema’s capacity for inquiry, confrontation, and remembrance…
In Andrew Bujalski’s admirable, vaunted 2002 debut, Funny Ha Ha, the microbudget auteur and occasional actor’s nervous temp, Mitchell, ineffectually attempts to seduce an aloof young lady over a bedroom chess match. As if pawns themselves, dependably obeying the established rules of conduct, the characters in Bujalski’s films are consistently…
“When Beeswax came out in 2009, I felt like there was a sense in the world of, ‘Well, that’s another one of the same from him,'” writer-director Andrew Bujalski says by telephone. “That frustrated me. I wanted to shake everybody by the collar and say, ‘No, can’t you see that…
All you need for a movie are two guys and two guns. Unless that movie is 2 Guns, in which case you probably need a good deal more. The problem with so many current action movies, this one included, is that once you’ve seen one, you can’t help feeling you’ve…
A movie can be highly imperfect, stilted, or implausible in all sorts of ways — and still be everything you go to the movies for. The Canyons, Paul Schrader’s contemplation of moral decay in Hollywood, is that kind of picture, in some places so crazy-silly you want to laugh and…
In his new documentary, One day, everything will be free, first-time filmmaker and Phoenix artist Joseph Redwood-Martinez goes deep into the Sadhana Forest reforestation project in Haiti. The volunteer-run initiative gives advice and assistance to local farmers dealing with soil erosion issues from the slash-and-burn deforestation that plagues the area…
“I kept thinking she was the ugly duckling who was going to turn into a swan,” a 40-ish loudmouth complained as the crowd trudged out of a preview screening of The To Do List. “But she was an ugly duckling all the way through!” He was talking to two women…
The lauded “Golden Age” of television just makes Vince Gilligan sad. Let’s get specific: “The sadness for me at the heart of it is that television now makes stories for grownups that Hollywood movies don’t allow filmmakers to make,” the Breaking Bad creator/writer/director/producer said Sunday at New York’s Museum of…
Porn re-inserts itself into the arthouse with this week’s The Canyons, co-starring adult industry stud James Deen, and next week’s Lovelace, a biopic of the Deep Throat star — two highly publicized releases that reconfirm the hopelessness of going hardcore in mainstream movies. Whether it’s works that inject un-simulated sex…
Back in May, Welcome Diner turned from pop-up restaurant to pop-up theater when it hosted the première screening of Arrested Development’s new season on Netflix. Now the established diner calls to local filmmakers as it hosts its first ever Southern Summer 48-Hour Film Fest…
Pacific Rim was released a couple of weekends ago, detailing humanity’s war with extra-dimensional giant monsters known as Kaiju. In the film, the Earth forces managed to fight off the monsters with giant robots known as Jaegers. These robots look to be expensive and resource-intensive and, in our times of…
Friends ended less than a decade ago, but it’s already a relic of a bygone era — a critically respected network sitcom that enjoyed massive ratings. That’s the central irony of the Must-See TV show’s legacy: It was one of the last programs to enjoy a national audience before cable…
As summer comic-book blockbusters go, The Wolverine is not as elephantine as it could have been. It’s more, well, wolverine — bony, loping, a little shaggy — and, blessedly, director James Mangold doesn’t get bogged down in mythology. You don’t need to diagram the convoluted relationships between Stan Lee and…
With an offhand precision that suggests he might prove one of his generation’s major actors, Michael Cera lays bare two specific human weaknesses in writer-director Sebastián Silva’s altered states/group dynamics road drama Crystal Fairy — weaknesses you’ll likely recognize from life rather than from other movies. The first is the…
