For two nights, people crowded the Welcome Diner front patio to watch 11 short films made in just 48 hours. Each team was randomly assigned an odd genre to make a film, with such options as “talking animal sitcom” and “coming-of-age time travel.” What the teams made in just two…
If there’s a problem with Michael Rossato-Bennett’s Alive Inside: A Story of Music and Memory, an engaging, vaguely uplifting documentary about how personalized music therapy can help dementia patients, it’s that it ignores the very tune it’s playing. Rather than present its elderly, memory-impaired subjects as human beings who deserve…
Williams in Moscow on the HudsonOn this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of The Village Voice and Amy Nicholson of L.A. Weekly remember Robin Williams, who died on Monday. He was 63…
When you put a pair of losers in uniforms, at the end of the day they’re still losers. Best friends and roommates Justin (Damon Wayans Jr.) and Ryan (Jake Johnson) learn that the hard way but not without finding some joy in the fantasy that you can become the success…
Titles don’t get more ironic than The Expendables 3. The franchise claims to be about death-seeking mercenaries yet stars ’80s action heroes, who refuse to die. Three films in, everyone in the sprawling team is still alive and ass kicking, save for Bruce Willis, whose million-dollar-a-day asking salary has caused…
The Giver is more simple and raw than the rest of today’s teen dystopias that try to cram in unnecessary backstory and love triangles. (Original author Lois Lowry published her novel in 1993, which makes it officially the cool aunt of Katniss and the kids.) The story picks up several…
Maybe you think you know what Woody Allen did or didn’t do in that summerhouse all those years ago. Maybe you look at his history — shacking up with a Stuyvesant high school girl in the late ’70s; marrying his longtime partner’s adopted daughter in the ’90s — and simply…
Actress Lauren Bacall has died. She had a massive stroke on Tuesday, August 12, in New York City, according to TMZ. She was 89. The Golden Age of Hollywood film star was known for her husky voice and “The Look,” Bacall’s way of posing for stills in which she’d put…
This week we mourn the loss of one of the most notable performers of a generation. Actor and comedian Robin Williams was found dead in his Tiburon, California, home from an apparent suicide on Monday, August 11. He was 63 years old. His unexpected passing comes as both a shock…
Robin Williams has died of an apparent suicide, according to multiple news outlets including Entertainment Weekly and TMZ…
The Valley has not yet finished celebrating the life of the late Bill Thompson. The creator, producer and co-host of the hit children’s television program, The Wallace and Ladmo Show, passed away on Wednesday, July 23, at the age of 82. Now the community is coming together to remember Thompson’s…
On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice and Amy Nicholson of L.A. Weekly discuss Woody Allen’s latest, Magic in the Moonlight, and revisit Get on Up and Guardians of the Galaxy, and finally, touch on the new documentary The Dog…
Barricade the windows and cue the Jaws soundtrack, because one of the greatest cinematic train wrecks of all time is returning to select Valley theaters for one night only. And this time, it’s a sequel. For those who missed the July 31 television debut of Sharknado 2: The Second One…
Star presence, that distillation of charisma and sometimes glamour, lies at the heart of the movies’ appeal. The star presence James Harvey evokes so richly in his new book, Watching Them Be, is never simply about physical beauty. Harvey rightly points out that Ingrid Bergman’s fresh unaffectedness was distinctly unglamorous,…
Daniel Radcliffe’s first trip to Comic-Con kicked off like the world’s cuddliest Nuremberg rally. This summer, just minutes after he walked into Hall H, the hangar-sized sardine can of 6,500 people sang him “Happy Birthday.” It was an emotional moment for everyone. “The fact that I was turning 25 slightly…
Before you buy that tiny box turtle in Chinatown, know that it can live for 100 years. Which means that among all the Mad Libs nonsense of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles — a comic book-turned-media-phenomenon that’s always half-admitted it’s a goof — at least the teenage part is accurate…
In the highly imperfect world of contemporary romantic comedies, What If is as close to perfect as anything we’ve got, not least for the way it captures the abject hopefulness of young people who’d like to be in love but don’t know how to go about it. Who does know…
Even those of us who loved Robin Williams as a performer would have to say that sometimes he was too much — too wired, too pleading, too on. There were times when I’d see him nattering away on a late-night talk show, or suffer through a performance like the one…
Filmmaker Mary Mazzio’s Underwater Dreams is timely, because it deals (perhaps too tangentially) with immigration reform. And the movie, which recently played for a week on various cable networks and now has opened nationwide in commercial theaters, is pleasant to watch for locals because it’s set here in Phoenix, specifically…
In Calvary, Brendan Gleeson plays a Catholic priest who plods through a rustic Irish village that’s more brutal than beautiful. The beach is gray, the waves are choppy, and the wind whips his ankle-length black cassock as though every step were a fight against nature. In some ways, it is…
Necrophilia and gross-out realism abound in James Franco’s Child of God. If director/co-writer James Franco had retitled his adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s 1973 novel Child of God to A Man’s Love for a Corpse, he’d have a more honest film on his hands — not to mention a purposefully campy…
Culinary mash-up The Hundred-Foot Journey is tasty enough. Lasse Hallström has become an expert at making mom-jeans movies, nonthreatening pictures in which headstrong women find love just when they think it’s too late (Once Around), take the upper hand with their cheating husbands (Something to Talk About), and turn small,…
