Vadim Rizov

Mainstream awareness of Breitbart, Infowars and other unsavory conservative “news” outlets has skyrocketed, as millions suddenly found themselves needing to know who Steve Bannon et al. were. For me, none of these outlets or talking points were news: I’m Texas born-and-raised — there, free-floating libertarian paranoia is a standard component......

The wooden troll figures that Thomas Dam began carving and selling in the ‘50s had a great deal of folklore behind them but no cast of fixed characters. Though the Trolls have since been in TV specials, video games and a short-lived series, none of those have established what we......

As has been widely noted, Woody Allen's Crisis in Six Scenes isn’t really a television series; its six episodes are not particularly self-contained, and plot developments crest and climax willy-nilly regardless of where each segment ends. It’s a two-and-a-half-hour movie, the longest one Allen’s ever made, and with the option......

When Relativity Media — the production company/distributor behind Masterminds, the newest vehicle for Zach Galifianakis to do his painfully committed schtick — started getting press, co-founder/co-CEO Ryan Kavanaugh boasted of his secret sauce for success. A proprietary risk-evaluation algorithm that crunched variables like cast, release date, relative examples in the......

Robert De Niro — the Raging Bull himself, now aged from boxer to trainer — is introduced in Hands of Stone bathed in Madison Square Garden’s overhead spotlights, more the image of a reigning champ than the promising fighter whose American debut his character, Ray Arcel, has come to see......

"It's number seven. The angel caressing the blonde." On the phone with his publicist, selecting stills from his new film, Idiots and Angels, Bill Plympton is having a very businesslike conversation about some very surreal images. Two days before Angels' New York opening, Plympton was engaged in a whirl of......

Preparing for a weeklong run of Olivier Assayas' Carlos — both in its full 319-minute glory and, for the impatient, in the just-under-three-hour recut — the American Cinematheque warms up with refresher screenings of two of Assayas' key films, 1996's Irma Vep and 2002's Demonlover. It's not much of a......

The New Beverly's triple feature of classic screwball comedies presents a chance to consider two different approaches to comic rage. Monkey Business is the most cheerful of the three: As ship stowaways, the Marxes delay the token plot for a good 20 minutes, the better to wreak havoc without impediment......

ALPHA AND OMEGA Someday they'll make an animated movie in which carnivorous animals actually kill and eat their prey; until then, we're stuck with the likes of Alpha and Omega, where the big lion-vs.-dinner encounter involves felines dodging a caribou stampede. That scene is shamelessly stolen from The Lion King,......