Melissa Anderson

In most of his eight films and especially since The Fighter (2010), choreographer of chaos and screwball scion David O. Russell has assembled boisterous, buoyant casts. His manic ensemble players, like those in Silver Linings Playbook (2012) and American Hustle (2013), carom off one another, their high-pitched energy keeping the......

No sentence distills the essence of one strain of cinephilia — mine especially — better than this one: “Motion pictures are for people who like to watch women.” Bracing in its profound simplicity, this line was written in 1983 by Boyd McDonald (1925–1993), author of the essential collection Cruising the......

Fueled by impotent, blustery outrage, Adam McKay's The Big Short, about the grotesque banking and investing practices that led to the 2008 financial collapse, is about as fun and enlightening as a cranked-up portfolio manager's rue-filled comedown after an energy-shot bender. Based on Michael Lewis' 2010 best-selling book of the......

New York has often been the setting for films about heroin addicts, with titles ranging from Shirley Clarke's cinéma vérité–tweaking The Connection (1961) to Slava Tsukerman's new-wave cult classic Liquid Sky (1982) mining the drama of smack freaks tying off, shooting up and nodding out. But Josh and Benny Safdie's......

See also: *Top 10 Films of 2012 *More L.A. Weekly Film Coverage Most of the blathering this year about the death of the movies has already evaporated from the mind, like so much inert gas. But one gnomic pronouncement endures: Leos Carax describing cinema as "a beautiful island with a......

In his filmmaking debut, journalist David France, who wrote the first story about ACT UP for our sister paper the Village Voice, assembles a thoroughly reported chronicle of that direct-action advocacy group's most vital era, from its founding in 1987 (six years into the AIDS epidemic) through 1995. Expertly compiled......

An amiable, seriocomic, high school–reunion movie, 10 Years succeeds in pulling off a fine varsity talent show. Although some performers — notably Channing Tatum, who also produced, and Ari Graynor — are more appealing than others, the film is admirably consistent in its nostalgia-averse exploration of the uncertainties that define......

In anticipation of the release of the remake of the 1976 girl-group melodrama Sparkle -- Whitney Houston's posthumous film appearance and her return to movies after a 15-year absence -- we look back at the handful of celluloid performances by the woman once known as "the Voice." Houston's pipes certainly get......