John Cusack

Spike Lee’s ‘Chi-Raq’ is a timely effort that will raise awareness through its passion but fade through its flaws

Love & Mercy Written by Oren Moverman & Michael A. Lerner Directed by Bill Pohlad USA, 2015 Based on the life of The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, Love & Mercy depicts the singer’s descent into mental illness at the peak of the band’s popularity in the 1960s, while in the 1980s a chance meeting with …

Hollywood could easily be the perfect fantasy world of Cronenberg’s obsessions. The themes associated with body horror, from the fascination with decay to the battle between body and mind, are staples of the torrid extremes of Tinsel Town. In 2012, David Cronenberg’s son, Brandon, tackled these ideas with his feature debut Antiviral. That film explores a dystopian future in which the obsession with celebrity is taken to extremes of consumption. In Antiviral, the masses purchase meat grown from their favourite celebrity’s cells and head to a special clinic in order to be infected with the same venereal strain as their Hollywood Idol. The film externalizes the growing cultural obsession with fame, and concentrates that obsession through corporeality and sex.

The Bag Man Written by David Grovic and Paul Conway Directed by David Grovic USA, 2014 There was a time when seeing the involvement of either John Cusack or Robert De Niro would lend a hefty amount of prestige to any project, so the idea of both men appearing in the same film, circa the …

There are just two—count ‘em, two—days until Fantastic Fest 2013 kicks off in Austin , Texas, at the Alamo Drafthouse Lakeline. In case you hadn’t been keeping track, I’ll be there for the majority of the festival covering as many movies as possible. (I will be a movie-watching/reviewing machine, just you watch.) If you’ve been …

Serial killers have provided ripe material for film for several years, both directly and indirectly. Alfred Hitchcock’s seminal horror classic Psycho famously had a lead character modelled after Ed Gein, while David Fincher’s Zodiac notably took a different tack by focusing on an ultimately unsuccessful investigation.

Lee Daniels’ The Butler is an intensely silly film, but all things considered, it’s silly for unexpected reasons. A movie that offers up the image of John Cusack playing President Richard Nixon, with the only distinction between Cusack’s normal visage and his Nixonian veneer being a Pinocchio-like nasal extension, should have its silliness all sewn up in such goofy celebrity casting. But instead, what makes Lee Daniels’ The Butler almost entertainingly ridiculous is less the eclectic, deliberately weird cameos and more a flat, sappy, and inconsistent-to-the-point-of-being-schizophrenic script that very badly wants to tie its title character to Important Events of the 20th Century without fleshing said character in at all.

Anyone reading this likely knows that the end of summer portends a few important milestones in a moviegoing year, chief among them the proliferation of film festivals in locations as diverse as Venice; Toronto; Telluride; and, of course, Austin, Texas. Yes, we’re just over 5 weeks away from Fantastic Fest 2013. Today, the organizers announced …

The Raven Directed by James McTeigue Written by Ben Livingston and Hannah Shakespeare USA, 2012 In a room of posh, opulent women, Edgar Allan Poe (John Cusack) commands their undivided attention by reciting the film’s titular poem, The Raven. Enamored, one of the women tries her hand at poetry as well. Crude, unsophisticated and juvenile, …

It’s pretty serendipitous that after the fine career retrospective by our London corespondant Al White earlier this week, we would get our first official image of John Cusack as Edgar Allen Poe in The Raven.  James McTeigue’s thriller tells the final days of Edgar Allen Poe as he assists a young detective with a murder …

2012 Directed by Roland Emmerich This review is SPOILER ridden so beware. Then again, if you’ve seen any disaster movie made since 1960 then nothing will be a surprise. Trust me. Judd Apatow, Tina Fey, Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell and all the other maestros of contemporary comedy should be afraid, as there is a new …