As Saint Jerome noted so wisely, "Early impressions are hard to eradicate from the mind. When once wool has been dyed purple, who can restore it to its previous whiteness?" Read more »

"You think I'll sit back and do nothing as you try to eat me like a juicy grasshopper?" shouts Richard, the thuggish head of the Ugandan crime syndicate, the Tiger Mafia. Read more »

In 1997, Pedro Costa (above), at the age of 38, began a trilogy exploring Portugal's impoverished, an undertaking that would continuously draw raves from the more erudite critics around the world. First came Ossos, which was pursued by In Vanda's Room (2000) and Colossal Youth (2006). These films, often showcasing the same characters, are sublimely visual, meditative masterworks that paint within shadows the seemingly plotless lives of the drug-addled inhabitants of a ghetto that is slowly being dismantled. Read more »

Judd Apatow's Trainwreck doesn't truly merit its title until this comic venture totally goes off the blasted tracks in its final quarter. What starts out as a hilarious consideration of modern mating rituals, sort of a distaff take on Apatow's earlier comedies (e.g. 40-Year-Old Virgin; Knocked Up), winds up as a queasy quantum leap backwards into the pages of Marabel Morgan's 1973 multimillion bestseller, The Total Woman: Read more »

You could be vaccinating felines for a year at an animal shelter and still not hear the word "pussy" as much as you do in the first half hour of Entourage. This expansion of the HBO TV series appears to have been conceived by a gaggle of misogynistic, beer-chugging adolescent virgins who brag about getting laid, but the closest they've ever gotten is a Playboy centerfold bespattered with cream of mushroom soup that they rescued from the city dump. Read more »

A cherubic blond toddler is shown in Super 8 film: playing on a lawn, sitting on his parents' laps, celebrating birthdays. He's a lovely child and clearly adored. It's easy to imagine his future as, essentially, peaceful and stable, full of strong connections—and very hard to imagine what actually happened: that this babe in arms, Kurt Cobain, grew up to be a tormented artist who would take his own life at age 27.  Read more »

Of the hundreds of films screened at festivals across the nation only a handful will wind up at your local theaters, and that goes for those lucky enough to have been viewed at the growingly prestigious Tribeca Film Festival (TFF). Read more »

Warning: The plot of Brad (Ratatouille) Bird's Tomorrowland is an incomprehensible muddle. A Wachowski screenplay reimagined by William Burroughs would be easier to follow. I'm only telling you this out of kindness so you won't feel like a complete mental lummox when, as this action offering for pre-teen girls ever so slowly ends after 130 minutes, you realize you don't know what the fuck happened. Read more »

Good news for Comingsoon.net's Joshua Starnes. He can recycle his critique of Pitch Perfect (2012) for its sequel: "Pitch Perfect isn't particularly bad. It isn't particularly anything. And that's what's most disappointing about it."

The low-costing original Pitch took in $113,042,075 worldwide on a production budget of $17 million, which deemed it the second highest grossing comedy/musical since 1984, losing the top spot only to School of Rock (2003). No wonder there is a follow-up. Read more »

Is the media suddenly realizing that there are people who were born before 1945 who are still very much alive? And that there's a whole bunch of them? According to the 2010 census, if I read Wikipedia correctly, the figure clocks in at 28,282,721. Read more »

"The filmmakers respectfully ask the media to not discuss the film's ending" is a sentence included in the press notes for Luke LoCurcio's twelve-minute short "Aphasia." Now since aphasia means the sudden inability to communicate, whether through speech, writing, or even sign language, while not losing one's intelligence, and there's only one main character in the film, unless you can't put 6 and 7.2359 together and come up with 13.2359, you will probably have already guessed the finale. If not, I have no doubt you watched Titanic and was caught off guard that a ship sinks and Leo dies. You probably also pondered why Frozen isn't set in Miami Beach. Read more »

Boccaccio's 14th century masterpiece has inspired artists for centuries, from Chaucer to Shakespeare and from Voltaire to Poe. His classic recounts how seven women and three men, who escaped from a plague-ravished Florence to the countryside, entertain themselves over two weeks, each telling ten stories a piece. Read more »

"God save the Queen!" the masses cheered.

A solid narrative short, like a short story, in most cases, should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Of course, in the proper hands, this rule is meant to be broken. As for a documentary short, information should be supplied, a world revealed, and the viewers' sense of a certain topic should be transformed or heightened. Read more »

Bill Plympton is not a genius, or so he insists, although none of his thousands of fans would be shocked if a MacArthur "Genius Grant" came his way. This former contributor to Playboy, The New York Times, and MTV has been a cult cartoonist and animator now for over a quarter of century, garnering an Oscar nomination in 1987 for his short "Your Face." Read more »

What is it that makes an artwork important? Relevance over time is one answer. This past summer in New York City, both the Museum of Modern Art and Film Forum ran a month-long series of Film Noir screenings. And this December of 2014, the Brooklyn Academy of Music ran a "Sunshine Noir" series of Film Noir shot in Los Angeles. Three revivals in one year speak to the continued pertinence of this genre: Film Noir is timeless. On the surface, Noir is stylized and sexy, but its hidden undercurrent illuminates something about our deeper vulnerabilities. Read more »