When the Academy Award nominations for Best Director were announced on Thursday morning, what most award-season trackers noticed first was who was missing: Ava DuVernay, director of Selma . Had DuVernay made it into the field, she would have been the first African-American woman ever nominated in…

I was recently quoted as saying , “I don’t give a shit” if Instagram has more users than Twitter. If you read the article you’ll note there’s a big “if” before my not giving of said shit. As quoted: If you think about the impact Twitter has on the world versus Instagram, it’s pretty significant.…

(Photo: iStock) I had never seen real-live people having sex before. Then, this past October, I attended a porn shoot/play party hosted at Oasis, a Toronto pool lounge and sex club. A jaunty, bearded 24-year-old (meta porn name: Alias) in a dress shirt and tie was giving it to his girlfriend,…

Okay, maybe you've done your homework so you're sufficiently prepared to direct your first film. Maybe you've got some excellent ideas and have talent bursting from every pore, but guess what. You're going to miss something. We all do. And when that happens, it's usually the most inane, most…

SimCity players have discussed a variety of creative strategies for their virtual homelessness problem. They've suggested waiting for natural disasters like tornadoes to blow the vagrants away, bulldozing parks where they congregate, or creating such a woefully insufficient city infrastructure that…

Self-portrait by Vivian Maier. Photo by Vivian Maier/Maloof Collection courtesy of IFC Films When the documentary Finding Vivian Maier was released last spring—accompanied by a burst of interest in the life and work of its subject, an eccentric and reclusive street photographer whose vast body of…

Adrian Tomine, the artist behind several New Yorker covers, will publish a book later this year titled “ Killing and Dying .” It is the newest collection of his comic-book series “Optic Nerve,” which Tomine began self-publishing at the age of sixteen. I spoke with him recently about how the series…

Each epoch dreams the one to follow. — Jules Michelet Every epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one to follow, but in dreaming, precipitates its awakening. — Walter Benjamin Now that it’s 2015, we have (plus or minus a few months) caught up with the farthest future shown in the Back to the Future…

T he first time I met Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, they were wearing Rollerblades and Glazer was psyching herself up to simulate sex with a giant oak tree. Tucked out of view on a shady forest path in Prospect Park on a warm day in September, the stars and creators of Broad City were filming a…

P aul Thomas Anderson likes to take his time. Ask the 44-year-old director of Inherent Vice about adapting Thomas Pynchon 's 2009 stoner-noir novel – in which a hippie-dippy private detective (played by The Master 's Joaquin Phoenix) tangles with all sorts of Seventies Southern California types – or…

Most good filmmakers revisit familiar themes and situations throughout their careers. A consistent area of inquiry is probably essential for would-be auteurs. And while it’s unusual for directors to remake their own pictures, it isn’t unheard of: Alfred Hitchcock’s 1956 American revision of The Man…

There's no such thing as bad publicity: Joyce McKinney Sundance Selects As a documentarian, Errol Morris is less a humanist than a connoisseur of “human interest,” and Tabloid , his ecstatically received and queasily entertaining new movie, is not so much a return to form as a reminder of his…

In photographs, the staff of Charlie Hebdo who got massacred in Paris last Wednesday looks like a happy crew. The atmosphere of exhilarated, jauntily scruffy mischief-making is familiar to me from my own alt-weekly days, and the feeling of intimacy was unsettling. Outright identification would have…

It hasn't been easy writing a blog about filmmaking without having a project of my own to show since my 2007 fly-by-night production of The West Side . The main reason for this? I tried to get something made in the studio system. 200 pages of screenplay and twenty-something meetings later, I arrived…

“I spent my whole life trying not to become a gangster,” Abel Morales says, his diction flawless, his resolve barely cracking. Encased in a broad, stiff camel coat, with his hair coiffured into a bouffant that could repel a hurricane, Abel, played by a masterfully controlled Oscar Isaac, may not…

When I think of cigarette smoking in the NBA, without a doubt, the first person who comes to mind is the gregarious, beloved Serb: Vlade Divac. Even your casual NBA fan most likely recalls hearing the tales: When he came into the league — not in the ’50s, when the harrowing health concerns were not…

I feel your pain, bitter, lonely, nerdy guys. I really do. It sounds corny to say it like that, but I don’t know how to say it and be believed. I know that because, having experienced this emotion from the inside for most of my life, I sure as hell resisted believing it when I heard people saying…

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia , which begins its 10th season tonight on FXX, has been on the air for almost a decade. It’s quite a run for something that started out as a short film about a guy trying to borrow some sugar. The show has been renewed for an 11th and 12th season already. What will…

It may be Detroit vs. Everybody in the blogosphere, but Black Milk is more concerned with improving himself. The Motor City producer and emcee dropped his album If There’s A Hell Below in October, months after his Glitches In The Breaks album. Fans could tell that he’d been shifting more towards…

Two Dissolvers keep the Heat conversation going... Nathan: In 1995, Heat wasn’t just a movie: It was an event, the long-awaited teaming of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, two of the most important actors of their generation. They shared The Godfather Part II, but they famously had no scenes together .…

In Michael Mann’s crime epic Heat , Robert De Niro plays Neil McCauley, a professional thief who resides in—and presides over—a modern home of glass and steel overlooking Los Angeles. As with the home of William Petersen’s tormented detective in Mann’s superb 1986 thriller Manhunter , the space…

Musical touchstones come in two variations: There are the ones that people remember (Motown, Thriller , Rebecca Black) and there are the ones people don’t remember that they remember. An example of the latter is Flood , the third album by long-running nerd-rock institution They Might Be Giants. Ask…

John Carpenter ranks among the finest genre filmmakers of all time. His run from the mid-’70s through the ’80s — including Dark Star , Assault on Precinct 13 , Halloween , Elvis , The Fog , Escape From New York , The Thing , Starman , Big Trouble in Little China , Prince of Darkness , and They Live…

Last week, Mark Ronson’s collaboration with Bruno Mars, “Uptown Funk,” did the seemingly impossible and unseated Taylor Swift at the top of Billboard ’s Hot 100 chart. Ronson had previously notched several top-10 songs in the U.K. and elsewhere, and he won two Grammys in 2008 for producing Amy…

Brace yourselves for a weird night. There might be a little extra drama when the ball drops in Times Square, thanks to one of the more confusing political protests in recent memory. On a night when more than a million potentially lawbreaking, probably tipsy revelers will be crowding the most…

Hipsters aren’t anything new. Under Stalin, even the U.S.S.R. had them. They were called stilyagi . Whereas today’s hipsters are obsessed with skinny jeans and fixed-gear bicycles, the stilyagi were obsessed with Western culture–in particular, with jazz, boogie woogie, and rock ‘n’ roll. But in the…

Over the course of my 18 years of professionally writing about film, I have been wrong countless times. But I have seldom been more wrong than when I saw James Cameron’s Avatar and told my companions, “Holy shit! That is easily going to be the biggest flop of all time! What kind of audience could…

Odds are you probably have a stick or a tub of it sitting in your fridge right now, but do you have any idea how margarine became a staple in most kitchens? It turns out, margarine has a long and controversial international history, and can even boast the involvement of Emperor Napoleon III in its…

Movie musicals are having a moment, but it’s hard to tell what kind of moment it is. Two giant studio adaptations of Broadway mainstays belted their hearts out last Christmas; a third, directed by an American film legend, came out last summer, between a star-studded record-industry fable and a…

Archie Andrews had to die. It was the best way to help bring the long-lived comic icon and his collection of everyday, relatable friends full circle in time for a 75 th anniversary rebirth and allow him to remain rooted in today's present. "It was a decision that was long in the works — we were…

There's a place in central Florida where all your dreams come true. The weirder ones, anyway. The ones about your most decadent sexual fantasies, the ones where you're wandering through a party that never ends, or launching eggs into a 500-pound man's asshole, or fucking a girl while simultaneously…

Emerson Spartz calls himself an aggregator, but he acts more like a day trader. Illustration by Oliver Munday One afternoon in June, Emerson Spartz, an Internet-media entrepreneur in Chicago, left his office and walked several blocks to the Museum of Contemporary Art, where he was scheduled to speak…

The New York Times: Popular TV Series and Movies Maintain Relevance as Novels http://t.co/0TG4UXhfH2

The journalists at Charlie Hebdo are now rightly being celebrated as martyrs on behalf of freedom of expression, but let’s face it: If they had tried to publish their satirical newspaper on any American university campus over the last two decades it wouldn’t have lasted 30 seconds. Student and…

If you’ve seen Big Hero Six, chances are that one of the things that stuck with you was Baymax’s “balalala” fist bump. You can see the exact moment in the YouTube clip above. Most people saw that and just laughed at the silliness of it. Me, I set my watch. Upon first seeing it, I guessed (correctly)…

Interview: Heiko Hoffmann A German translation of this article has been published in Groove 151 (November/December 2014) Richard D. James has been releasing music for almost as long as Groove magazine is being published. When the 25th anniversary of our mag approached this year, we heard that James…

Whittier, Alaska, is a town of about 200 people, almost all of whom live in a 14-story former Army barracks built in 1956. The building, called Begich Towers, holds a police station, a health clinic, a church, and a laundromat. Its hallways resemble those of a school or a detention center. One can…

We’re a skeptical bunch in Massachusetts. Even a little ornery. And the impulse is never more pronounced than in the realm of sports; just turn on your car stereo. But here’s the thing about athletics. There is nothing quite like a big happening — a World Series victory or the triumphant return of…

There is no “but” about what happened at Charlie Hebdo yesterday. Some people published some cartoons, and some other people killed them for it. Words and pictures can be beautiful or vile, pleasing or enraging, inspiring or offensive; but they exist on a different plane from physical violence,…

Authors are upset with Amazon. Again. For much of the last year, mainstream novelists were furious that Amazon was discouraging the sale of some titles in its confrontation with the publisher Hachette over e-books. Now self-published writers, who owe much of their audience to the retailer’s…