Screen
Brutality depicted
New rule: You can watch Django Unchained as many times as you want, but you have to watch 12 Years a Slave at least once first...
Squash the spider, man!
Spider-man’s new costume looks swell, and Emma Stone is charming. Those are the only two things about The Amazing Spider-Man 2 I didn’t hate with the fiery anger of a thousand exploding suns. Every other performance, every last bit of dialogue and plot, every ...
The movie year in review
Paul Newman died, James Cameron came out of retirement and Quentin Tarantino...
Brave the new world
The time has come to rewrite Jean-Luc Godard’s aphorism: “All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.” Writer/director/cinematographer Sean Baker doesn’t even need the gun — just two transgender actresses, three iPhone 5s with fancy lenses and East Hollywood at his...
Only in dreams
There are two moments in Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood that take your breath away. The first is visual: A series of neon...
Metal Lurching
To walk in to The Man with the Iron Fists by choice is to give up your right to bitch about story and character. This is a movie written and directed by The RZA, a member of the powerhouse rap group The Wu-Tang Clan; produced by Eli Roth, the guy who made Hostel; and...
Songs of Solomon
For whatever reason, avant-garde art films have never gained the pop-culture cachet achieved by other realms of the art world...
A slice of ‘Ninja’
The extraordinarily violent Ninja Assassin opens with a tough guy Yakuza gang leader having a tattoo inked on his back by a mysterious old man who talks about the four noble professions, the five rings, and other cliché Japanese cultural mumbo-jumbo. A henchman ...
Seduced by Paris
I feel like the Parisians kind of get me,” says Gil Pender in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, an early clue to this character’s cluelessness...

















