Judd Apatow’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin is, above all else, a cute, clean-cut, cheerfully vulgar crowd-pleaser. That, and it singlehandedly launched the career of The Office‘s Steve Carrell, raked in $177 million against a $26 million budget, and ushered in a whole new generation of mainstream R-rated comedies with this astounding commercial success—all only five years […]

No matter the shiny Hollywood polish sparkling on its surface, David Lynch’s classic psychological thriller Mulholland Drive, featuring no real stars outside of Naomi Watts and (to an admittedly lesser extent) Justin Theroux, eventually reveals some of his strangest, most intensely nightmarish imagery, but don’t be put off by its surreal ambiguity. Difficult as it […]

Deliverance is one of those classic movies most well-recognized for certain unforgettable scenes, but is really best-experienced if you have no knowledge of those particular scenes. Many of you likely know of them already, and they’d already been spoiled for me ages before seeing the movie itself, but if they haven’t been for you, watch […]

It may seem odd—downright puzzling, even—to decide on Blue Velvet being my formal introduction to the infamously bizarre David Lynch, given its reputation for being among his edgiest, scariest cinematic nightmares. Not that its controversial nastiness necessarily repelled me from ever seeing it, but for a while, I found myself more naturally gravitating towards 2001’s […]

In the otherwise-normal world Pixar has flipped Inside Out, you’re never in charge of any of those troublesome emotions; it’s the emotions themselves that are in charge of you. “Joy” (Amy Poehler), “Sadness” (The Office veteran Phyllis Smith), “Fear” (Bill Hader), “Anger” (a very appropriately cast Lewis Black), and “Disgust” (Mindy Kaling, another Office veteran) […]

Nobody in their right mind would say that Cameron Crowe is (or, judging by how far his Hollywood career plummeted after everyone turned up their noses at the star-studded Aloha, always was) terrible at making movies. Yet over the years, it seems as though my body has become increasingly allergic to everything and anything he […]

VULTURE’s Kevin Lincoln: So why CHiPs? Why make a ChiPs movie? CHiPs writer-director Dax Shepard: A very good question. Because I’m always looking for something that will hold both comedy and motor sports. I’m looking for anything that I think I can combine those two things and that someone will make. So this movie’s got […]

Without giving too much away (that’ll be done later, so don’t read much more if you wish to go into the film completely blind), the first 25 minutes or so of 48 Hrs.—in other words, everything before Eddie Murphy’s character, Reggie Hammond, is discovered loudly belting out The Police’s “Roxanne” in a prison cell—make you […]

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Average dude is really talented at something they love, then an accident and/or disability sets them back a bit, then, after others melodramatically recite the type of “uplifting” quotes you’d find plastered to the wall of any given Rite-Aid, gets back on the game with more passion than […]

During the making of Robert Zemeckis’s deserted-island drama Cast Away, production had to be shut down to grant its star, Tom Hanks, time to lose enough weight to suit his character’s physical transformation (which, for reasons I’m guessing are explained in the film itself, also required growing a beard). As we all know, Zemeckis is […]