Right about now is a great time to saddle up the couch, turn the fan on, and watch some movies. As comedy fans, we remember often being sad about summer because, at one point, Saturday Night Live was actually funny on a consistent basis. When SNL would stop airing new…
It’s time for things to get a little trippy this summer in the movie theatre. From monkeys taking over the earth to a new joint by cult favorite Alejandro Jodorowsky, there’s a lot of weird stuff to see this month at movie houses all over the Valley that will, like,…
Better set your DVRs, biker boys and girls. Because A&E’s History Channel is taking an in-depth look at one of Arizona’s lesser known subcultures. Biker Battleground Phoenix is new reality show that sets out to document the competitive world of custom bike building in the very state known for producing…
On this week’s episode of the Voice Film Club podcast, Voice film critics Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek, along with L.A. Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson, discuss rom-com Begin Again (2:26), starring the always-interesting Mark Ruffalo. They also talk about the biting rom-com parody They Came Together (15:47), which might…
Believe it or not, during Transformers: Age of Extinction, Michael Bay’s fourth rattling of the toy box, I felt one moment of near transcendence. Three-fourths of the way through the punishing 165-minute runtime — and 15 minutes after my seatmate took off her 3-D glasses in exhaustion — my brain…
It’s kind of happy-sad, like watching a kid you knew as a toddler graduate from high school: Chris Evans, seemingly destined to be a boy forever, is now officially a grownup. In Bong Joon-ho’s futuristic snowbummer Snowpiercer, the Korean director’s first English-language film, Evans plays the leader of a group…
Mark Ruffalo’s great gift, besides those scruffy good looks and that prickish, hungover charisma, is capturing the essence of the guy who’s spinning toward a crash but trying to angle himself back. His greatest performance, in Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me, one of the best films of the…
If a toddler tried to re-create the mystifying behavior of adults, it would look a lot like Paul Haggis’ Third Person, a drama in which grownups scream and cry and kiss for reasons that are confounding even to those who understand speech. The film follows a handful of couples or,…
Earth to Echo is a slender kiddie flick about a quartet of preteens and their palm-sized alien pal that’s at once bland, well-intentioned, and utterly terrifying about the mental development of modern children. As in the most honest kids films, our 5-foot heroes admit to being isolated, unhappy, and cowed…
To call Roger Ebert one of the great populist film critics is to damn him with faint praise. Though he took pride in working for the scrappier of the two Chicago dailies, the Sun-Times, and though we do have him to thank — or curse — for popularizing the thumbs…
In January 2013, an incandescently brilliant American political activist and computer programmer named Aaron Swartz was hounded to suicide by the overzealous U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, Carmen Ortiz. Anyone who argues differently has a desk drawer full of government pay stubs. Brian Knappenberger’s The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of…
It’s official– Scottsdale’s premier film festival event is coming back for its 14th year of screening local and independent flicks. Last year’s Scottsdale International Film Festival hosted 9,000 attendees, making it second in attendance only to the Phoenix Film Festival. This year, you can join in on the fun during…
Ravenous is a film-shaped UFO: It’s so delightfully weird that its very existence defies logic. Imagine a film that makes A Modest Proposal–style satire out of Dracula’s gothic horror tropes in the spaghetti western milieu of The Great Silence. It’s a pitch-black comedy about Manifest Destiny and cannibal frontiersmen. Set…
Recently, Star Wars fans, along with much of the planet’s pop-culture collective, nearly ruptured the Internet in their enthusiasm to share set-building photos from next year’s long-awaited new feature film. But these weren’t shots of just any set. They depicted the construction of the Millennium Falcon. You’ve never heard of…
The most radical thing about this eco-terrorism drama is its quiet patience and formal vigor. While most studio pictures slap together their images with all the care of a grocery-store deli clerk assembling the ham and carrots on a cheapo party platter, Kelly Reichardt, the director of Night Moves, favors…
Violette is a film consumed by hunger, as was its heroine, the French writer Violette Leduc: hunger for love, for companionship, for artistic validation. Portrayed with flickering levels of ferocity by the supple-faced Emmanuelle Devos, Leduc forcefully grasps at potential paramours and sucks down cigarettes with the intensity of a…
Romances are Hollywood’s most anxiety-inducing fantasy. Like superhero flicks or horror films, they exist in a phony world of big scenes and breathtaking climaxes. But while audiences know that geeks can’t meld with spiders and that the bogeyman isn’t real, they still hope to fall in love and, boy, it’d…
We leave the movie theater on this week’s Voice Film Club podcast in favor of a longform interview with Village Voice film critic Stephanie Zacharek, who’s been at the New York paper for about a year. Before that she wrote for Salon, Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone and the Boston Phoenix,…
True Blood, HBO’s supernatural orgy of ridiculousness, ends its seven-season run this summer. It’s a sad day for fans, of course, but we’d like to think that somewhere supporters of Charlaine Harris (who penned The Southern Vampire Mysteries, or The Sookie Stackhouse Novel, which the show’s based on), are feeling…
The Rover, Australian filmmaker David Michôd’s follow-up to the brutish family drama Animal Kingdom, is a post-apocalyptic western from the outback, a stretch of land that already looks like the world’s been blown away. All Michôd needs to convince us of the devastation is a title card pegging the events…
A truly punk act, a shout of freedom, frustration, and exaltation, hits about halfway through Lukas Moodysson’s girl-punk reverie We Are the Best! The three 13-year-old protagonists, high on the idea of the three-chord band they’ve just started, find some damp garbage bags on the street that, they discover, are…
Yes, Obvious Child is a romantic comedy. And, yes, it includes an abortion. But describing it as an “abortion rom-com” sells short what a thoughtful story director Gillian Robespierre has crafted. Jenny Slate portrays 20-something stand-up comedian Donna Stern, who was “dumped up with” and recently lost her job as…
