“I’m going to put music in your pocket. One hundred songs. No, 500. I’m going to put between 500 and 1,000 songs in your pocket,” Steve Jobs blurts out to his college-aged daughter Lisa (Perla Haney-Jardine)—yes, the same daughter whose paternity he vulgarly denied in the pages of Time magazine over a decade earlier—in the […]
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Perhaps there are too many movies. When I started writing professionally about cinema 24 years ago, seeing all the key films that received North American distribution—blockbusters, indies, foreign releases—was a feasible proposition, but now that technology has democratized the medium and swelled access to motion pictures of all stripes, it’s impossible to stay ahead of
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“The Martian,” when it succeeds, does so despite itself. It is a survival-in-space movie almost entirely free of tension, its tone set always to comic relief, its grand imagination and serious plot almost completely ruined by its own sarcasm. The film stars Matt Damon as Mark Watney, an astronaut in dire straights. After the crew
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“Nothing will make sense to your American ears, And you will doubt everything we do. But in the end, you will understand.” So says a character in Denis Villeneuve’s outstanding “Sicario.” These prophetic words haunt both the audience and protagonist until they suddenly crystallize. The film is like a whodunit where instead of a crime, there’s a philosophical
You’ve heard of sing-along movies, but what about the dance-along? Milwaukee Film Festival patrons are encouraged to unlock their bodies Saturday night during “Stop Making Sense” (Oriental Theatre, 11 p.m.), Jonathan Demme’s euphoric 1984 concert film about the Talking Heads and the ever-expanding big suit worn by frontman David Byrne. Playing for the third consecutive
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It’s a sorry festivalgoer that doesn’t make at least one deep cut discovery. Much of the ink spilled about the Milwaukee Film Festival, given its rising cultural cachet, is devoted to the Competition and Spotlight programming. (If you haven’t heard, Saturday’s centerpiece is the nonfiction “The Great Alone,” about four-time Iditarod champion Lance Mackey frosting
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After six years of launching with undercooked comedies, pint-sized documentaries, and one scorching drama made by relative unknowns, the Milwaukee Film Festival will for the first time kick off with a movie directed by a major international figure. Paolo Sorrentino’s “Youth,” which stars Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel as entertainment legends trading jokes and wisdom
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Despite the “Avengers” series’ guaranteed billions in box office for years to come, writer/director Joss Whedon won’t be returning after this latest entry. One might ask: What filmmaker and certified geek wouldn’t love the chance to helm the ultimate superhero franchise indefinitely, one that sends moviegoers into a delighted, money-burning frenzy? Well, one who prefers art
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As always, the TCM Classic Film Festival did not disappoint on any level this year, be it the quality of the prints (whether archival celluloid or shiny new digital restorations), the quality and diversity of the guests (famous, knowledgeable, and often both rolled into one), the operation of the festival (seldom did a presentation start
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Los Angeles is home to hundreds of film-related events every year, and even though purist cinephiles often bemoan a lack of access to older films compared to New York, our repertory circuit stacks up pretty well: Cinefamily, the New Beverly, the Egyptian, the Aero, UCLA’s Billy Wilder, LACMA, the list goes on. But nothing in
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