Nick Schager

The Canyons

Mainstream Movie Porn Sucks: How Real Sex in Real Movies Is a Real Distraction

Nick Schager
Porn reinserts itself into the arthouse with this week's The Canyons, co-starring adult-industry stud James Deen, and next week's Lovelace, a biopic of the Deep Throat star—two highly publicized releases that reconfirm the hopelessness of going hardcore in mainstream movies. Whether it's works that inject un-simulated sex into their fictionalized......

The Act of Killing, 2013's First Masterpiece

Nick Schager
More terrifying than any horror film, and more intellectually adventurous than just about any 2013 release so far, The Act of Killing is a major achievement: a work about genocide that rightly earns its place alongside Shoah as a supreme testament to the cinema's capacity for inquiry, confrontation and remembrance......
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Girl Most Likely, a Jersey-vs.-Manhattan Comedy

Nick Schager
Less funny than her worst SNL sketch, Girl Most Likely strands Kristen Wiig in a dreadful, disingenuous city-versus-suburbs comedy that mercilessly mocks New Jersey before turning around and celebrating its provincial trashiness over the hoity-toity snootiness of Manhattan. Fired from her job and dumped by her boyfriend, once-promising playwright Imogene......

Grown Ups 2 Has No Real Plot to Speak of

Nick Schager
Adam Sandler pats his own back for being loyal in Grown Ups 2, an excuse for the star to hang out with his friends while he plays a Hollywood bigwig who’s celebrated for moving back home so he can hang out with his friends. Like its 2010 predecessor, Dennis Dugan’s......
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Disney TV Is Poisoning Your Daughters

Nick Schager
I recognize that, even coming from a father of two preteen daughters, that headline might sound alarmist, so let me elaborate—the Disney Channel and its prime competitor, Nickelodeon's Teen Nick, are a pox upon our tween nation, corrosive forces that impart more awful messages than any of Disney's retrograde princess......

After Auteur: How M. Night Shyamalan Became Just Another Director

Nick Schager
Wait, you didn't know that After Earth, the Will Smith–Jaden Smith sci-fi adventure hitting theaters this weekend, is the latest from Shyamalan, he of The Sixth Sense fame and Lady in the Water infamy? Columbia Pictures has done everything in its power, in both trailers and print and TV advertisements,......

Ethan Hawke, Before and After: Watching an Actor Grow Up

Nick Schager
Before Midnight may be the greatest film ever made about impermanence -- a fitting theme for a work that also reestablishes the A-list credentials of the mutable Ethan Hawke. Much like his character in Richard Linklater's romantic drama series -- which, in its third iteration, finds Hawke's Jesse and paramour......