If you’re going to make a film based on a zany idea, say, a man who wants to have an orgy with his friends’ girlfriends in order to heal from his mother’s recent passing, you’re going to take a lot of care to not make it a gimmick. You’re going…
If you read the synopsis of Louise Archambault’s 2013 French-Canadian drama Gabrielle, then you walk into the movie knowing the experience isn’t going to be easy. The title character, played by Gabrielle Marion-Rivard, is a 22-year-old woman living with Williams Syndrome, a rare genetic disorder characterized by delayed neurological development,…
When we read up on King of Herrings while deciding which films to go see at this year’s Phoenix Film Festival, the peg of a “Tom Waits tips-his-hat-to Woody Allen world” pretty much promised an entertaining, artsy ride into grittiness. However, limiting what King of Herrings does to just those…
Dear people who lack modesty, aspire to be famous, and have no problem living in isolation with a house full of strangers on national television, CBS’ Big Brother is looking for you. The long-running reality series, which is holding casting calls across the country for its upcoming 16th season, is…
The Phoenix Film Festival kicks off a week long of movies and parties tonight with the screening of Steven Knight’s Locke. With Tom Hardy as the lead and only visible actor in the film, which takes place in real time over an hour-and-a-half drive through the U.K., the film has…
This time, it’s Captain Asskick goes to Washington. Tucked into a pocket of his workout sweats, Steve Rogers — a.k.a. Captain America, the serum-enhanced Yankee Doodle Dynamo who’s spent the past six decades in deep freeze — keeps a notebook of cultural beats he’s missed: Star Wars, Marvin Gaye, Thai…
Our story resumes: Having found a love-like feeling for Jerôme (Shia LaBeouf), “restful domestic comfort” has, at the outset of Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac: Volume II, robbed the young Joe (Stacy Martin) of her orgasm. Naomi Wolf documented a similar problem in her 2012 book Vagina; the similarities between Joe…
Why can’t women stay friends? That’s a trick question, of course, but also one that British actresses Emily Mortimer and Dolly Wells — lifelong pals in real life — attempt to answer earnestly and honestly in their new HBO cringe comedy Doll & Em. In the six-episode series, Mortimer and…
Before Chris Lamont started the Phoenix Film Festival, the Valley didn’t really have one to call our own. With this year’s event, which takes place at Harkins Scottsdale 101 April 3 through 10, and features films with big-name actors like Jude Law and Tom Hardy, it’s gearing up to be…
John Waldron never got high telling jokes. “Back when I was doing stand-up comedy,” Waldron recalls, “the other comics would come off stage and they’d just be high as kites from the laughs they’d given the audience. They couldn’t sleep for hours. I never had that.” But when Waldron heard…
The Chicano labor leader César Chávez now can join Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela in the pantheon of heroes whose world-altering achievements are dutifully recounted in timid, lifeless films any substitute teacher can pop into the school DVD player when the regular history teacher is out with the flu. With…
As Bob Zmuda tells it, screenwriter Norman Wexler used to tote a briefcase full of thousands of dollars to pay off the many people that he pissed off each day. Zmuda — the comedian, writer, tall-tale dispenser, and longtime wrangler of Andy Kaufman — dished his best Wexler story on…
As Bob Zmuda tells it, screenwriter Norman Wexler used to tote a briefcase full of thousands of dollars to pay off the many people that he pissed off each day. Zmuda — the comedian, writer, tall-tale dispenser, and longtime wrangler of Andy Kaufman — dished his best Wexler story on…
To hear Darren Aronofsky tell it, in the interviews he’s given recently to the New York Times Magazine and the New Yorker, there was no way in hell he’d let his special effects extravaganza Noah, years in the planning, be your run-of-the-mill, candy-ass Biblical epic. The ark built by Russell…
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s name is only about one-seventh the font size of the title on the poster of Sabotage, formerly Breacher, formerly Ten, his third attempt — after the full-auto Western The Last Stand and the goofy Stallone-co-headlined prison-break joint Escape Plan — in 14 months at a post-gubernatorial comeback. A…
Last year, Phoenix Film Festival knocked our socks off with great independent films made by both local and national talent, earning it a Best of Phoenix award. This year, we’re preparing to dig into more shorts, documentaries, features, and Q&As at the fest, but making the call on what to…
Let’s start with the ending, the closing credits disclaimer that insists that none of the lead actors in Lars von Trier’s two-part erotic epic Nymphomaniac filmed penetrative sex. If there is real sex in the movie — and it sure looks like there is — it must have been the…
If you count forward from Jim Henson’s mid-1960s TV appearances with a fringy pup named Rowlf and the lizard, made from an old winter coat, who would later become Kermit the Frog, the Muppets have outlived most of their early puppet peers by more than two generations: You don’t see…
Dystopian movies don’t have to make sense. As the audience, we’re obligated to sit down with our popcorn and soda and pretend that yes, of course, in the future monkeys rule the Earth, women can’t bear children, and Arnold Schwarzenegger is an everyday construction worker. It’s a mutual contract of…
Think back to the worst thing you did in high school. Shoplifting? Busted with a joint? Trespassing, all lit up on Boone’s Farm? Now, imagine you pulled your rite-of-passage nogoodnik routine in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in the early 2000s. You get busted, the cops get involved, you get hauled to the…
The big news out of the Berlin Film Festival was that Shia LaBeouf, here to promote Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac: Volume 1, behaved like an ass on the red carpet at the movie’s premiere. He showed up in a proper tuxedo, but also with a paper bag over his head…
Chelsea Handler just released her fourth book Uganda Be Kidding Me — fifth, if you count the book she edited that was written by her friends about her, called Lies that Chelsea Handler Told Me. Lucky for us, she’s stopping in Phoenix on her tour to promote the book, which…
