Happy Easter/Passover/unaffiliated weekend, everyone! This is your Friday Movie Pile & Do-It-Yourself Woodworking Instructions, a weekly guide to the new films plus directions for building handsome, functional furniture. Let’s see what treasures await us! Ready Player One (PG-13, 2:20) Plot: In the future, a teenage gamer must save the world (well, the virtual gaming world) […]
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Ready Player One is set in a future where people spend most of their time in a virtual-reality world called OASIS that allows them to play games and have adventures in whatever fictional settings and with whatever fictional characters they choose (provided the filmmakers could get the rights). Our hero, 18-year-old Wade (Tye Sheridan), tells […]
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Editor’s note: After we’d published two of these columns, we discovered that Noel Mellor already has a well-established podcast and book called “Adventures in VHS.” We chose the name at the last minute and neglected to check whether anyone was already using it — totally our mistake. We apologize to Noel and encourage you to […]
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You remember, of course, how a breach at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean produced a gateway through which extra-dimensional Godzillas entered our universe and wrecked our cities, and the only way to stop the destruction was to build giant Transformers to fight them. (It is by the same logic that some want Oprah to […]
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Welcome to the Friday Movie Pile & Zesty Spring Salad Recipes, the column where we tell you about the movies coming out this weekend and also provide a healthy, delicious recipe that you can make at home for your family or pets! Put on your movie pilin’ pants and let’s go. Pacific Rim Uprising (PG-13, […]
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Animation saved Wes Anderson from self-parody. By the time he released his fifth feature, the exotic Indian travelogue The Darjeeling Limited (2007), even many of Anderson’s biggest fans (myself among them) had begun to grow a little wary of his — there’s no other way to put this — shtick. His scripts were still funny, […]
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With his Best Adapted Screenplay win for Call Me by Your Name, James Ivory received some long-overdue recognition from the Academy. (He also became, at 89, the oldest winner in any category in Oscar history.) His prior nominations – all in the Best Director category – were for A Room with a View (1985), Howards […]
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By most reckonings, 2012 was the best year of Jennifer Lawrence’s career. She starred in The Hunger Games, a movie that had an outstanding box office run and propelled her to stardom. Only a few months later, she starred in Silver Linings Playbook in a role that would eventually win her an Oscar. She’s been […]
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Movies — our most precious natural resource. Each week the Friday Movie Pile seeks to explain and analyze the new releases, for the betterment of humanity. You’re welcome. Tomb Raider (PG-13, 1:58) Plot: Lara Croft (Alicia Vikander), who rides a bicycle for a living, goes in search of her father, who was secretly an adventurer/tomb […]
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Not only are the SXSW programmers an astute bunch of film enthusiasts who scour the globe for the finest in independent cinema … they also really dig horror flicks. Of course you’ll always find a solid batch of scary, suspenseful movies tucked away in the “Midnight” section (every good film festival has some sort of […]
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“Growing up can be a little bit scary and weird,” explains Kayla (Elsie Fisher) in one of the YouTube videos that frame Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade – and also, it seems, articulating one of the many running themes in this year’s SXSW Film Festival slate. That’s not terribly surprising, as the coming-of-age drama is one […]
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On Saturday, March 10, every film that screened in The Paramount – SXSW’s premier venue in downtown Austin – was directed by a woman. It was representative of this year’s lineup, with the strongest showing (at 33% of features and 59% of shorts) of female filmmakers in the festival’s history. And Saturday culminated with a […]
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