All of the ingredients are there: the doughy white guys, the semi-obscure passion, the earnest effort at legitimization, and the occasional shrug to the camera by every bit player that just says ‘oh, those boys’. Yet Way of the Puck somehow fails to hold the same charm, humor, and audience as contemporaries like King of Kong. more ›

July was a bittersweet month for LAist. We had a record-breaking month with nearly a million visitors coming to our humble site. Little did we know that some of the guests were big wigs from the venerable Los Angeles Times who left with two of our editors. more ›

Picture yourself lounging on a divan surrounded by nubile, young interns fanning you with palm leaves and feeding you peeled Muscat grapes, as you type yet another hilarious stream-of-consciousness film review for Los Angeles' leading group blog. more ›

Idiocracy is currently the best movie in America that no one's ever heard of. That doesn’t mean Idiocracy is great, but it certainly deserves better than the shabby treatment it's received from 20th Century Fox, which seems to have unceremoniously dumped the movie into unsuspecting theaters with a promotional budget approximating that of a typical Saturday night beer run. When it comes to screwing over Mike Judge, Fox has a tradition to uphold. Two... more ›

If you’ve ever wondered why most sex scenes in mainstream American movies suck (and not in the good way), then this movie is for you. This Film Is Not Yet Rated is a surprisingly good documentary that unearths the shadowy mechanisms of the MPAA’s “voluntary” movie rating system. This film is very smartly directed by Kirby Dick and cleverly edited by Matthew Clarke, fastidiously untangling the collusion between movie studios and the government to... more ›

While a couple of movies are hardly enough to qualify as zeitgeist, there's something serendipitous about the back-to-back release of two films featuring teenage Latino protagonists growing up in East Los Angeles.* Wassup Rockers and Quinceañera both focus on teenagers defying familial and cultural expectations, but even though they were both shot on video and take a quasi-documentary approach towards their subjects, they achieve very different results.... more ›

One of the biggest box office hits of 2006 that you've probably never seen or even heard of is Krrish, an action-adventure/romance/sci-fi extravaganza courtesy of India, home of the world's most prolific film industry. Released in late June, Krrish was produced on a $10 million budget (lavish by Bollywood standards) and has grossed anywhere from $30 to $60 million dollars, depending on which figures you believe. The movie is actually sequel to the 2003... more ›

For a movie about a group of female cave divers, The Descent doesn't have nearly enough hot lesbian action. That's my only complaint about this movie. Otherwise, it’s freaking awesome!!!... more ›

Any movie where Steve Carell plays a gay, suicidal professor who has proclaimed himself the world's #1 Proust scholar is okay by me. Actually, it's better than okay. Throw in Alan Arkin as a heroin-snorting grandfather (isn't it cool when old people do hard drugs?), Greg Kinnear as a would-be motivational speaker and Abigail Breslin as a little girl with dreams of child beauty pageant stardom, stuff them into a dilapidated Volkswagen bus along... more ›

"I wanted to believe. More than most I wanted to believe. I wanted there to be something more than this awfulness that surrounds us every day." This poignant statement of yearning and soul-gnawing dissatisfaction comes just before the climactic series of events in Lady in the Water, and it sums up why audiences flock to the films of M. Night Shyamalan: the hunger to connect to something beyond what we can see. If only... more ›

I love movies. I love clothes. And because I don't watch enough reality TV shows to have an unhealthy dose of schadenfreude in my life, I love stories about evil bosses who receive their comeuppance. So I was, of course, dying to see The Devil Wears Prada. I am a girl after all. My lady friends who were lucky enough to have attended advance screenings or rushed to the theater on opening weekend all... more ›