• Lucy

    August 27, 2014 - By 

    After honey-voiced hardware in Her, a blank-faced alien stalker in Under Her Skin and a lycra-skinned super spy in Captain America: Winter Soldier, Scarlett Johansson continues her trend of playing characters who are Not Like Us. In Lucy she is the titular miniskirt-hugging party girl, who gets kidnapped by scowling Koreans and ingests a super-drug that transforms her into a reality-bending superwoman. It’s also another in a long line of unconventional and unstable heroines from Parisian writer-director Buc Lesson, who gained success with the memorably offbeat action of Nikita, Leon: The Professional and The Fifth Element, as well as spearheading the Liam Neeson renaissance with the gruff, workmanlike Taken series. Lucy is a jumbled…

  • Her

    February 18, 2014 - By 

    Her opens with a close-up of its star, Joaquin Phoenix, speaking directly into the camera, but he is not addressing the audience. Nor is he speaking to another character on the other side of the camera. Instead he is talking to a machine. Her imagines a world only one step removed from the one we live in today, where the only conversations people have are with their phones or their computers, of a lonely, cellular existence where every human interaction is managed through a digital medium. The film takes place in a near-future Los Angeles and follows Theodore Twombly (Phoenix),…