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Stephanie Zacharek is the principal film critic for The Village Voice. She also co-hosts the Voice's weekly film podcast, Voice Film Club. She's a member of the New York Film Critics Circle and of the National Society of Film Critics.
2013 Stories by Stephanie Zacharek
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12 Years a Slave Prizes Radiance Over Life
published October 16, 2013
Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave is the movie for people who think they're too smart for The Butler. The story it tells, a true... More >>
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Celebrating the Late Karen Black at BAM
published October 16, 2013
With those off-kilter features and that bold, confident carriage, she might have stepped out of Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon:... More >>
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Tom Hanks Goes Where Few Actors Have Dared in Captain Phillips
published October 9, 2013
Tom Hanks has built a career out of playing aggressively noble roles, so it's only natural to want to see him taken down a peg. But it's no... More >>
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Lost Boys Win in The Inevitable Defeat of Mister and Pete
published October 9, 2013
Sometimes it's the little things in a movie that get you. Early in George Tillman Jr.'s The Inevitable Defeat of Mister & Pete, a... More >>
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A Touch of Sin Shows What it Means to be a Have-Not in Modern China
published October 2, 2013
Over the past few years, our view of modern China—at least as culled from news reports—is that of a country whose economy has... More >>
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One Giant Leap: Gravity Is a Thrilling Breakthrough
published October 2, 2013
Some movies are so tense and deeply affecting that they shave years off your life as you're watching, only to give back that lost time, and... More >>
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NYFF: Garrel's Jealousy Is Like a Good Haiku
published October 2, 2013
Among moviegoers who try to keep up with French cinema, the more recent pictures made by post-New Wave avant garde-type Philippe Garrel tend to... More >>
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NYFF: Abuse of Weakness is Brilliant, Maddening, Unlikeable
published October 2, 2013
French filmmaker Catherine Breillat knows all kinds of ways to get under people's skin: In her 2004 Anatomy of Hell, a male character... More >>
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Joseph Gordon-Levitt Triumphs Over Online Porn in Don Jon
published September 25, 2013
To paraphrase the Bee Gees, Joseph Gordon-Levitt should be dancing. He's already done it in (500) Days of Summer, where he led an... More >>
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Fall for James Gandolfini One Last Time in Enough Said
published September 18, 2013
When a relatively young actor dies suddenly, as James Gandolfini did in June, it's tempting to wonder about the roles he'll never get to play.... More >>
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Rush's Racers Draw New Life From Ron Howard
published September 18, 2013
It's 1976, a year when all the groovy girls are traipsing around in tiny suede skirts and all the cool guys have Badfinger hair. One of those... More >>
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Mother of George Offers a Gorgeous Brooklyn Fertility Tale
published September 11, 2013
The inability to have a child is often treated as a white-people problem, the province of middle- and upper-class couples who end up resorting... More >>
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Smug Parents Get What They Deserve in Hell Baby
published September 4, 2013
Smug, gentrifying white people having babies: Making fun of them never gets old. Yet relatively few movies are devoted to this highly amusing... More >>
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Contempt: And God Created Bardot
published September 4, 2013
There's an old joke that's designed to be funny ha-ha for men but is, I suspect, only bitterly funny for most women: "Show me the most... More >>
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Venice Update: Kelly Reichardt's Night Moves, James Franco's Child of God, and More
published September 4, 2013
In 1953, the Venice Film Festival jury didn't award its top prize, the Golden Lion. Instead, it made the highly unorthodox decision to award... More >>
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Venice Update: The Wordless Beauty and Brutality of Kim Ki-duk's Moebius and Scarlett Johansson in Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin
published September 4, 2013
It's 8:20 and you're in the breakfast room at your hotel, having your customary bowl of muesli. By 9:20, you're watching a spurned wife cut off... More >>
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Closed Circuit Tries Admirably, but Lacks Urgency
published August 28, 2013
Intricate, intelligent thrillers made specifically for grown-ups are so rare these days that it's tempting to award extra points to anyone who... More >>
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Our Nixon Reveals the White House's Home Movies
published August 28, 2013
Few political figures have given liberals of a certain age more pleasure than Richard Nixon. To watch such an unrepentant and obvious liar... More >>
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Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity is Lightning From the Heavens
published August 28, 2013
The late, great Elmore Leonard advised writers never to open a book with weather. Does a lightning storm count? Last evening I was welcomed to... More >>
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Venice Update: Nicolas Cage and the Misery of Joe
published August 28, 2013
As at most festivals, screenings at Venice are preceded by a recorded message asking... More >>
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The Grandmaster May Be Streamlined, But It's Still a Wong Kar-Wai Movie
published August 21, 2013
Plenty of film critics and Asian cinema aficionados care deeply that The Grandmaster, Wong Kar-wai's pointillist biopic of martial arts... More >>
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The World's End Is Likable, But Not One For the Ages
published August 21, 2013
The laddish pleasures of The World's End, Edgar Wright's comedy about a group of middle-aged guys drinking beer and facing mortality,... More >>
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The Butler Finds Urgency in the Conventional
published August 14, 2013
At the movies, straightforward storytelling, the kind in which a director and his cast push a story forward in waves of action and feeling,... More >>
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Ashton Kutcher Almost Reveals the Man Beyond the Devices in Jobs
published August 14, 2013
Geniuses, unfortunately, tend to be impossible people. Consumed by their own dazzling brilliance, they treat those closest to them cruelly and... More >>
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In a World. . . of Glass Ceilings, Lake Bell Smashes Herself Right Through
published August 7, 2013
Most women born after 1960 or so probably had parents or teachers who told them they could be anything when they grew up. Even so, plenty of... More >>
