Like first sex, writer-director Maggie Carey’s debut feature, The To Do List, is quick and messy, fitfully pleasurable, full of promise but not quite adept at getting everyone off. It’s an impossibly huge deal yet also a modest achievement, something we have to go through but that will no doubt…
Michael Cera is growing up. It may be hard to picture, as at one point it seemed as if baby-faced Cera could forever play the awkward teenage boy next door. But in the last few months, other than a recent return to his Arrested Development roots, Cera has left behind…
Before anybody even knew if 50 Shades of Grey would be made into a movie, there were bets being placed on who’d be a good fit to play the book’s main character, the infamous Christian Grey. The film’s producer, Dana Brunetti, announced last month that the movie’s set for release…
By Tab Sylvester Warning: This post contains spoilers. There are plenty of compelling reasons to watch Weeds creator Jenji Kohan’s new show Orange Is the New Black, the latest Netflix original series. But some of the comedy-drama’s most interesting scenes are also its steamiest. Not to mention the show’s cast…
There’s been plenty of speculation about who will be cast as the tall, dark, and handsome Christian Grey in the eventual (an official release date hasn’t been announced) movie. There are fake trailers featuring would-be leading men and women floating around the Internet, which have prompted some stars to publicly…
This morning, Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul and Neil Patrick Harris (a last-minute substitute for Kate Mara, who apparently had travel troubles) announced the nominees for the 65th annual Primetime Emmy Awards…
Incest, eyeball-gouging, interior decorating: If Only God Forgives is any indication, writer-director Nicolas Winding Refn is a man of many interests. He’s also put Kristin Scott Thomas in a blond wig and an assortment of cougar-mom outfits, which is either a plus or a minus, depending how you look at…
The world is full of lackluster movies. But the world is not full of Helen Mirren in a Marlene Dietrich fedora, or Helen Mirren in full-tilt eveningwear disposing of a bothersome corpse in a marble bathroom, or Helen Mirren firing a massive rifle-type thingie while sprawled on a picnic blanket…
There’s a gorgeous moment in Yoruba Richen’s documentary The New Black, currently playing the film festival circuit, in which two young black lesbian activists canvass an inner-city black neighborhood to drum up support for the gay marriage initiative that was on the ballot in Maryland’s 2012 statewide election. The women…
Adam Sandler is successful because he’s lazy. Not lazy in the sense that he has no ambition, or doesn’t want to work hard to maintain his status as America’s big-screen comedy king. But in the sense that Sandler has built an empire by doing the same things with the same…
Less funny than her worst SNL sketch, Girl Most Likely strands Kristen Wiig in a dreadful, disingenuous city-versus-suburbs comedy that mercilessly mocks New Jersey before turning around and celebrating its provincial trashiness over the hoity-toity snootiness of Manhattan. Fired from her job and dumped by her boyfriend, once-promising playwright Imogene…
Something like half the running time of the engaging new don’t-go-in-the-basement thriller The Conjuring is devoted to showing us characters proceeding slowly into the basement, or into the maws of basement-like places we know they shouldn’t go, often with just matches or a flashlight to guide them. Twice, deliciously, they’re…
In actual life, bureaucratic systems are the only workable state-citizen interface we’ve developed that can handle the sheer multitude of smelly, cranky humanity. In comedies, filmmakers often render the infinite and otherworldly in the mundane, human terms of bureaucracy, with all the waiting rooms, Muzak, and impossible regulatory complexities that…
Phoenix transplant Chris Cummings has set his newest horror movie venture in the Superstition Mountains with the Lost Dutchman tale as the catalyst for terror. He says the film focuses on four friends: the nice guy Adam, the jock dude Greg, his prissy girlfriend Laura, and her good-girl nursing student…
Ready or not, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo once again will invade the pop cultural consciousness tonight when the second season of the infamous reality program debuts on TLC. And if you’re one of the millions of viewers who plucked one of those “Watch ‘n’ Sniff” cards from the pages…
The average guy on the street may know who or what Big Star is or was. But the right guy will always know — or be heartened to learn. A grand power-pop outfit formed in 1971 in Memphis by Alex Chilton, former lead singer of the Box Tops, and Chris…
If the great god of movies, whatever slippery Mount Olympus of money he resides on, decrees that summer is the time for larger-than-life 3D blockbusters, Guillermo del Toro may as well make one. His Pacific Rim is summer entertainment with a pulse. The effects are so overscaled and lavish as…
With his anxious parable I’m So Excited!, Pedro Almodóvar imagines a plane malfunction not as a pretext for thrills, as in most films, but as a metaphorical farce: The jet is Spain, and what we should fear for is not just the passengers’ lives, but the country’s. Defective landing gear…
Until 2005 or so, no one thought much about modern piracy of the high-seas variety. But then Somali pirates began attacking merchant ships with increasing frequency, seizing vessels and holding their crews hostage for outlandish sums. Danish director Tobias Lindholm’s wiry, neatly crafted thriller A Hijacking wrests fact into the…
The Way, Way Back is a crowd-pleasing summer treat, predictable in its sweetness but satisfying all the same. It’s like the multinationally branded ice cream sandwich you get on any pier in the Western Hemisphere — market-tested to appeal to as many people as possible (but that you don’t mind…
Nat Faxon and Jim Rash didn’t set out to make a comedy about divorce. Eight years ago, when the improv comedians turned actors turned Oscar-winning screenwriters started writing a coming-of-age script based on a particularly upsetting moment from Rash’s childhood, they just wanted a happy ending. Yet almost all the…
In 1997, the programmers of the Making Scenes queer film and video festival in Ottawa, Ontario, received an unmarked package in the mail. It contained a videotape of an original film and no return address or contact information of any kind. The film, a five-minute short shot on video in…
