Once a year for 12 years, director Richard Linklater summoned a cast of actors—including his own daughter Lorelei, who was nine when the project began, and Ellar Coltrane, who was six—to film Boyhood, an utterly unique story of an utterly conventional American childhood. Boyhood is set in the 21st century, so there are divorced parents […]
Film
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Sturm und Dad
Into the Storm: A movie that features fire tornadoes
There is a school of thought that all stories can be categorized into one of three conflicts: Man against Man, Man against Society, and Video Bloggers against Tornado. Into the Storm fits solidly into that last category. Hot widower Richard Armitage is the vice principal of a middle American high school for symmetrically featured 20-year-olds, […]
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Passing the Audition
Domination and power in Polanski’s Venus in Fur
Roman Polanski’s new film is set in a Paris theater, with a cast of two. Thomas (Mathieu Amalric) is wrapping up auditions for his new play when Vanda (Emmanuelle Seigner) comes out of the rain. She’s coarse and slatternly—the exact opposite of what Thomas is looking for in his leading lady—but once she begins to […]
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PEW, PEW, PEW!
Comic book movies are supposed to be fun, remember?
After the thump-grimace-exposition-repeat pattern that turned Captain America: The Winter Soldier into such a self-serious snooze (that everyone nonetheless seemed to love), I worried I might be done with the Marvel universe. In fact, between all of Cap 2‘s winking references to Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (GRR, BRAND SYNERGY!) and Edgar Wright being forced out of […]
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Brain Dead
Lucy uses maybe five percent of its brain
Picture your college roommate Seth. You know, the incorrigible stoner who could spend hours waxing philosophic on the tiniest particles of the universe? And how each of these particles make up the very fabric of life? Hence the most powerful person in the world is basically the atomic twin of a fly alighting on a […]
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Stop Trying to Relate to Me
Zach Braff is an emotional terrorist who must be stopped
The definitive takedown of Zach Braff’s new movie has already been written: On the website Badass Digest, Devin Faraci wrote that Braff’s work is “aimed directly at the suburban lizard brains of slightly disaffected honkies who will never know true trouble, just the nagging sense that things should be easier for them than they already […]
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Twice
Begin Again: Like Once, but with Mark Ruffalo!
Surely you remember Once, that lovely indie drama from 2006 about the Irish guy and the Czech girl who connected through music, and who eventually sang their pretty song at the Oscars? Remember how sweet and plainspoken the film was, how its raw, micro-budget sensibility was so endearing? John Carney, its writer and director, remembers, […]
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Mating Rituals of the Millennial
Abortion gets rom-comical in Obvious Child
Obvious Child will always be known, first and foremost, as “the abortion comedy.” That’s the pitch, the premise, and the novelty of writer/director Gillian Robespierre’s great new film: It’s about a young woman who has an abortion and doesn’t feel bad about it. In defiance of every film trope about abortion, which insist that soul-searching […]
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The Balcony is Open
Life Itself is a beautiful ride
Roger Ebert made me want to be a film critic because he loved movies as much as I did. More even. Every time he sat down to watch a film, he wanted it to be incredible. That optimism was infectious, and even as his career moved into an internet era where film criticism is too […]
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Live Every Week Like It’s Shark Week
Sharknado is exactly what it sounds like…TOTALLY AWESOME
Have you ever wished for a fictional natural disaster so deadly, so dangerous, so filled with sharp, toothy goodness that it strikes fear in the hearts of Galeophobes? Look no farther than Sharknado, a Syfy made-for-TV movie about a man, his estranged family, and a whole ocean full of bloodthirsty airborne sharks. While in the […]
