In May in the Summer, Dahlia (Arrested Development’s hilarious Alia Shawkat) is a lesbian tentatively trying to step out of the closet. Editor’s note: This story was written by Village Voice Film Writer Scott Foundas, who will be reporting from the Sundance Film Festival throughout the week. In his brief…
The second season of Lena Dunham’s genius HBO show GIRLS is officially underway, and we’re definitely looking forward to seeing where this season takes us … and by “us,” we mean the girls of course: Hannah, Marnie, Jessa and Shoshanna. If you don’t want to bother with watching the first…
A chiller about two abandoned girls and their bond to the wraith of the title, Mama never delivers the primal terror its premise would suggest. Instead, the movie — the first feature by Andy Muschietti, who co-scripted with his sibling Barbara and Neil Cross — distracts with too much foolishness:…
We’re now a generation removed from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s brief, odd reign as the biggest star in movies. This Coppertone age lasted from 1990, when two of the 10 top-grossing pictures were Schwarzenegger’s Total Recall and Kindergarten Cop, until 1993, when Last Action Hero — an attempt at a tonal gene…
For the next 10 days, all Hollywood eyes — and those of many a filmgoer — will turn toward the frigid wilds of Park City, Utah, reportedly experiencing its chilliest winter in a decade. Their collective hope: to discover at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival (January 17 through 26) the…
Octavia Spencer is an American actress celebrated for her role in The Help, in which she played Minny, an outspoken maid. She won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress, and a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor…
I’m not a romantic. Really. I don’t need grand gestures or outrageous gifts — at least not in real life. I’m not a big fan of fairy tales, and I was never really into the whole Disney princess scene. In preschool, when other little girls played house, I’d stick the…
Our shiny, golden man is back for the 2013 Academy Awards. Nominees for this year’s awards were announced this morning, with a few surprises. We’ve listed them below, and we’re plotting award-time strategy (and perhaps a drinking game). So grab the popcorn and catch up on these flicks before February…
Originally slated to open last September, Gangster Squad was delayed when the movie-theater shooting in Colorado, suddenly made a scene of gunfire in Grauman’s Chinese Theatre “inappropriate.” Four months later, a turn in the film’s plot that relies on gunning down an adolescent risks recalling Newtown, but the proximity of…
When he died in December 2011, Kim Jong-il left behind more than a dynastic regime and a closet full of drab pantsuits. Jong-il, who ruled the hermetic North Korea from his father Kim Il Sung’s death in 1994 until his own passing 17 years later, was a noted cinephile and…
There are two things that are certain in life. One is that death will come for every one of us. The other is that every film Michael Haneke makes will have a fair shot at the Cannes Palme d’Or. Amour, Haneke’s much-garlanded latest, is set almost entirely within a well-appointed…
January is a dumping ground. Here lie your already failed resolutions, holiday cookie weight, and all the movies that weren’t up to December’s Oscar-bait snuff. But don’t fret. Thanks to a few theaters, museums, and Phoenix-based movie buffs, this month won’t be all lost when it comes to moviegoing. Mark…
Victor Moreno grew up watching movies and rending B-list flicks from a shop across the streets from his paren’t house. He comes from a family of lawyers, but broke tradition after graduating from the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at ASU (which he paid for by designing websites for…
Squeaking by with an Obama 2012–size victory margin, Paul Thomas Anderson’s thrillingly strange The Master tops this year’s Voice Film Critics’ Poll. It’s just ahead of Kathryn Bigelow’s electrifying hunt–for–bin Laden procedural, Zero Dark Thirty. Although set some 60 years apart, both films offered portraits of a traumatized America trying…
View the full 2012 Village Voice Film Poll Best film: 1. The Master (333 points; 46 mentions) 2. Zero Dark Thirty (296 points; 43 mentions) 3. Holy Motors (295 points; 46 mentions) 4. Moonrise Kingdom (233 points; 38 mentions) 5. This Is Not a Film (186 points; 28 mentions) 6…
The end of cinema? Hardly. More than ever, boiling this concluding year down to the 10 “best” movies feels both arbitrary and reductive. Ideally, I’d have 25 unnumbered slots. I’d cite another five, formally varied nonfiction films: Tchoupitoulas, Detropia, The Ambassador, Only the Young, and How to Survive a Plague…
Most of the blathering this year about the death of film and film culture has already dissipated. But one gnomic pronouncement endures: Leos Carax describing cinema as “a beautiful island with a cemetery” following the world première of Holy Motors at Cannes. What are the contents of that necropolis? As…
Gay-male weepies have left a long trail of tears, stretching back to the sobbing, self-loathing queens of The Boys in the Band, released one year after the Stonewall insurrection of 1969, and including high-prestige pictures like Philadelphia (1993) and Brokeback Mountain (2005). The genre, most prominent during the first decade…
“Just so you know, it’s going to take a while,” says the CIA officer to his newly arrived colleague at the start of Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty. The year is 2003, the place a secret prison (or “black site”) somewhere in the deserts of the Middle East or Asia,…
“Like a lot of other stuff in my life, I sort of fell backwards into it,” screenwriter Will Beall says of his unexpected perch atop Hollywood’s A-list. Unexpected, because just five years ago Beall was busy working for Tinseltown’s second most famous employer, the Los Angeles Police Department, where he…
Perhaps in response to bombastic mainstream Hollywood, international auteurs often veer toward minimalism — quieter emotions, slower tempos, a tightly defined era and setting. Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes is clearly a man of the art house — his new film, Tabu, was shot on 16mm black-and-white film stock, for starters…
Ah, here it is again: that special time we experience every two to six years when Quentin Tarantino makes a new movie, and people dig out the old “Tarantino just steals everything from such-and-such” arguments. You’ve heard them. Reservoir Dogs is a scene-for-scene rip-off of Ringo Lam’s City on Fire,…
