Peter Debruge is ecstatic to have found Spout after feeling like an outcast everywhere he’s lived. In Austin (where he majored in film studies at the University of Texas), half the town was busy trying to get their garage bands off the ground. In New York (where he worked for Entertainment Weekly and AOL Moviefone), nearly all his friends wanted to be actors. And in Los Angeles (where he now works as a features editor and film critic for Variety), everyone seems to be tinkering away on a screenplay. But here, among virtual friends, Peter is pleased to have found others who celebrate films on their own merits. Because let’s face it: He’s a big nerd. I mean, the guy spends his vacation days attending film festivals, for crying out loud. He watches both Berlin Alexanderplatz and Uwe Boll movies for fun. And back when they used to write about movies on dead trees, he regularly did so for Life, Premiere, Creative Screenwriting and the Miami Herald.
Gomorrah is brutal. That much goes without saying, given the genre. But unlike the more glamorous American gangster movies, which tend to elevate their anti-heroes to aspirational role models, Gomorrah turns that brutality against its subject — the widespread operations of Italy’s Camorrah clan. Like the bestselling exposé that inspired it, Gomorrah is more [...]
Critics had every reason to object when Billy Bob Thornton remade The Bad News Bears a few years back. After all, Walter Matthau had already defined the role of foul-mouthed Coach Buttermaker, a cranky alcoholic who oversees a team of misfit little leaguers, in the perfectly serviceable 1976 original. Now we get yet another variation [...]
Peter Debruge considers Erik Daniel Metzgar’s doc in the context of three other “issue films” at the Sundance Film Festival: Tibet in Song, Burma VJ and The Cove.
Have we got a pair of slumdog millionaires for you! In Rudo y Cursi, Y tu mamá también co-stars Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal reunite as two hardscrabble soccer fans whisked from the drudgery of small-town banana picking for a shot at the big time. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón’s kid brother Carlos Cuarón, the [...]
The advantage of seeing the Ashton Kutcher-starring Spread at Sundance, as opposed to in theaters down the road, isn’t just the fact that director David Mackenzie hasn’t yet been forced to neuter the film’s skintastic sex scenes (his 2003 Young Adam was shaved down for far less to get an R rating here in the [...]
Move over Milk. I Love You Phillip Morris does the gay rights movement one better, using in-your-face comedy and mainstream casting to defuse whatever anxiety the Heartland might have with guy-guy relationships — the irony being that this outrageous conman comedy from Bad Santa scribes Glenn Ficarra and John Requa was originally supposed to be [...]
There are capital-G Guys, and then there is Greg Mottola, whose semi-autobiographical “how I spent my summer vacation” comedy Adventureland insists that back in his college days, the young director was more sensitive than all those other dudes who just wanted to get laid. That would be fine and all if the big payoff the [...]
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We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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