In Jurassic World, Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic Park reboot — set 22 years after dinosaurs started walking the Earth, again — brontosauruses, stegosauruses, and velociraptors have become old hat, sort of like the mechanical Abe Lincoln at Disneyland. Meanwhile, the habitat around them has gone Vegas: Isla Nublar, home of the…
How convinced you’ll be by Soaked in Bleach, the latest vehicle for the Kurt-was-murdered theory the private investigator Tom Grant has now megaphoned for two decades, will hinge on how plausible you find its portrait of the Nirvana frontman approaching his end. The film insists that Cobain, far from the…
Twenty years back, at the height of the UFO boom, the truest believers in alien abduction scenarios would argue that their most compelling evidence was the commonalities between regular people’s stories of nighttime visitations. Even under hypnosis, “abductees” testified to remarkably consistent waking-dream terrors: an alert immobility, shadowed and mostly…
You may not have a summer break like you did when you were a kid, but that doesn’t mean you have to be a grown up at the movies. Let’s save the art house fare and thought-provoking movies for later this year. For June, it’s all about being a kid…
What does the world sound like when you’re Brian Wilson? When you’ve made a record that sounds like cirrus clouds look — as Wilson did with the Beach Boys’ small modern miracle of harmony, the 1966 Pet Sounds — all bets are off when it comes to the way ordinary…
iZombie is about as sunny and optimistic as the zombie genre gets, which of course isn’t all that much. Even by supernatural standards, it’s a bloodthirsty canon, demanding regular sacrifices of innocents and grisly feats of skull splitting and cerebellum cannibalizing. The CW’s Seattle neo-noir boasts plenty of both to…
Anna Are You OK? Studio Ghibli’s Marnie is a joyous-glum outsider drama. “I hate myself.” That’s an unusual statement coming from the hero of an animated film, let alone in the first two minutes. But 12-year-old orphan Anna (Sara Takatsuki), the protagonist of Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s lovely anime When Marnie Was…
Never Say ‘Not Her’ Again In Spy, Melissa McCarthy triumphs for the Susans everywhere. The Melissa McCarthy of Spy is different from the one who rose to prominence by shitting in a sink. Bridesmaids scored her an Oscar nomination, and for the ceremony McCarthy donned a glamorous rose gown with…
The Crimes Remain the Same The Connection’s glorious technique can’t disguise its familiarity. A movie about bringing down druglords that’s actually mostly about movies, Cédric Jimenez’s The Connection is stretched over driven-cop beats so familiar American audiences could probably follow it without subtitles. (It’s in French — add that to…
The first line in Entourage is a good indication of what the next 104 minutes will bring. Peering through a pair of binoculars while a speedboat carries him toward a yacht in the dazzling waters of Ibiza, Johnny…
Good or bad, Cameron Crowe movies build to improbable declarations of sincerity, to the great acts or speeches a man must loose from himself into a world too cynical to value them. His heroes always must filibuster regular life with their decency. Superficially, these acts and speeches are performed in…
The San Andreas fault stretches 810 miles up the Pacific coast, roughly the length of a dozen Dwayne “The Rock” Johnsons lying end to end. When it rumbles, we’ll need all 12 of him to spring into action — although, as Brad Peyton’s San Andreas warns, that still won’t be…
On my third day in Cannes, I was dismayed to settle in for a screening at one of the festival’s two main venues, the Debussy, only to notice that the guy to my left had removed his shoes and socks and, file in hand, was happily sawing away at his…
During “Compliments,” a first-season sketch on Inside Amy Schumer, a group of female friends respond to every bit of praise with a verbal self-maiming: “I tried to look like Kate Hudson but ended up looking like a golden retriever’s dingleberry,” says one. Sighs another, “Of course I see everyone when…
Poltergeist 2015 is to Poltergeist ’82 what today’s shipped-frozen-to-the-store Pizza Hut dough is to the kneaded-on-site pies the chain’s stoned cooks tossed in the Reagan era. It’s the same kind of thing, with the same shape and some shared ingredients, but the texture’s gone limp, and there’s no sense of…
The final episode of Mad Men was upbeat — if you enjoy the death of the counter-culture. On this special episode of the Voice Film Club podcast, Village Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl and editorial fellow Lara Zarum, along with the Voice’s TV critic Inkoo Kang, discuss the final episode…
CANNES, France — “Je m’appelle Max.” Now that’s an opening line, so much better in French, and it’s just one reason I’m glad I waited to see Mad Max: Fury Road here in Cannes on the morning of the festival’s second day, Thursday, rather than at home in the States…
Pitch Perfect 2 hit a few wrong notes for the Village Voice’s Alan Scherstuhl and special guest Monica Castillo, but LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson interpreted the film’s humor a little differently. We circle back to Sofia Vergara’s performance in Hot Pursuit, before arriving in the desert for Mad…
Blues legend Bessie Smith was arguably America’s most powerful black woman during her heyday in the ’20s and ’30s. Her reign wasn’t just based on being the highest-paid African-American entertainer of her generation, but, according to the new HBO movie Bessie, on the freedoms she allowed herself after breaking with…
“I’m over people who think they’re funnier than the movie,” says LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson, in the wake of her recent piece, “Stop Laughing at Old Movies, You $@%&ing Hipsters.” Joining her — *in the same room, for the first time ever on the podcast* — as usual…
Sofía Vergara is built like an amphora, a living testament to the form ceramicists throughout the centuries have adored. In the fleet and gloriously ridiculous comedy Hot Pursuit, Vergara plays Daniella Riva, a mobster’s wife who needs to be escorted from San Antonio to Dallas, where she’ll testify against the…
Depending on whom you talk to, we live in an era of conformity or one of anything-goes individuality; in a golden age of television or the brightest of movie galaxies. But just about everyone will agree that we’re ruled by screens of all sizes, which means it’s harder than ever…
