Paul Verhoeven

"Showgirl Is My Yentl": The 145-Minute Showgirls Sequel That Could

Sundance 2013: Sex with James Franco, Sultry Scarlett Johansson, Daniel Radcliffe's Jew-Fro, and a Great Film From Jordan

In his brief remarks before the first public screening of the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, Robert Redford praised the Sundance Institute's ongoing filmmaker development labs as "our core," noting that the festival itself was conceived "to create an audience for the filmmakers in our lab program."

Total Recall: A Look Back at the Older, Better One

Just because it made loads of money, stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, and features a three-titted mutant doesn't mean Total Recall isn't ruggedly individualistic art. Just look at its outsider pedigree: Total Recall was loosely based on a 1966 short story from the flushed mind of Philip K. Dick, produce ... More >>

Total Recall Is a Retread of Blade Runner, Brazil, Minority Report...Oh, and Total Recall

By Chris Packham Total Recall, directed by Len Wiseman, aspires to be less stupid than its 1990 predecessor and kind of succeeds for the first third of the film. If you subtract all the metaphysical illusion-versus-reality nonsense, Philip K. Dick's Walter Mitty story "We Can Remember It for You W ... More >>

Showgirls in Drag at the Dragonfly: The Classic Elizabeth Berkley Film, With Cross-Dressing

Lina Lecaro Detox Icunt and Willam Belli nail it as rivals Cristal and Nomi.​The glitzy getups. The awesomely ridiculous dialog. The impassive sex. The cringe-worthy acting. And, it's set in Vegas, baby! If any film is rife for theatrical parody, it's Showgirls. (One of its stars actually did ... More >>

Showgirls 2 -- Penny's From Heaven: Rena Riffel's New Spoof of Paul Verhoeven's, Err, Classic

Rena Riffel​ Everyone remembers the infamous scene from 1995 cult classic Showgirls in which Cristal Connors (actress Gina Gershon) gazes into the eyes of Nomi Malone (actress Elizabeth Berkley) and says, "You see, darlin', you are a whore." Though the notoriously so-awful-it's-great film see ... More >>

SHOWGIRLS 2: It's real, and the trailer is NSFW batshit insane.

​Last fall, word started to spread on the interwebs that an unknown German director named Marc Vorlander was planning to make a sequel to Showgirls, the Paul Verhoeven's 1995 trashterpiece, beloved by some but dismissed by many as one of the worst films of all time. In October, Vorlander confirmed ... More >>

Movie Reviews: Bandslam, Flame & Citron, The Time Traveler's Wife

Also, The Goods, It Might Get Loud and more

Valkyrie: The Man Who Nearly Killed Hitler

An interview with the movie's star and director, Tom Cruise and Bryan Singer

The Porn of Pain

Suffering may be the great, undying subject of cinema, but at any film festival worth its salt, the escalating volume of calamity, catastrophe and apocalypse means that the conscientious (or congenitally miserabilist) critic risks drowning in pain porn. Stumbling from divorce to rape to abuse to end ... More >>

In the Beginning

Last Dance

Showgirls: The Best Movie Ever Made. Ever! hits the stage one more night at UCB

Theater Reviews: Showgirls, As You Like It

Also, Outbursts, The Last Seder, and more

The Counterfeiters' Stefan Ruzowitzky Challenges Holocaust Dogma

Unorthodox Jews

The Counterfeiters: Blood Money

A morally ambiguous Holocaust tale of survival and collusion

In Control

Anton Corbijn masters the moving image

Lust, Yawn, Caution

There is a famous story about actor-director Erich von Stroheim that goes something like this: Cast as Rommel in Billy Wilder's 1943 Five Graves to Cairo, Stroheim was given a prop Leica camera as part of the character's wardrobe and proceeded to demand that the camera have film in it. When Wilder a ... More >>

Spare the Writer

Black Book, Grindhouse and the Relativist Hole

April 6, 2007

To Play or Not to Play: Tales of glory and folly on local stages by STEVEN LEIGH MORRIS and STEVEN MIKULAN

Guerrillas of Orange

Paul Verhoeven opens the Black Book on World War II

Evidence Grise

Paul Verhoeven returns to the past — his and ours — in the Holocaust thriller Black Book

Reporting From Mexico

Impressive fest proves Peter Bart wrong

Do-Run-Run

What to do in Los Angeles this week

Vote For Pedro (and Larry)

The small but conspicuous coterie of film critics seen perambulating this year's Toronto Film Festival decked out in red-and-white "Vote For Pedro" t-shirts were not, despite the potential misunderstanding, expressing their undying love for Napoleon Dynamite. Rather, the Pedro in question was Pedro ... More >>

Showgirls

Leave Your Inhibitions at the Door

Lalo Schifrin Swings

How an Argentinean became the ultimate American musician

Total Rehash

Cloning Arnold Schwarzenegger

My So-Called Rotten Life

Susan Tyrrell’s sentimental journey through money, fame, sex and amputation

Hollow Promise

iJunkets furnishes virtual face time with stars — but on whose terms?

Empty Dumpty

Sounding for echoes in Hollow Man

A Whimper From Venus

Beauty and the Beast

French cinema battles Hollywood’s global movie offensive

No Easy Pieces

Neil LaBute's sexual healing

Bad Girl

The incredibly strange films of Doris Wishman