The Sundance InstituteEvery Sundance there’s a crowd-pleaser, and most years it’s got one degree of separation from the Little Miss Sunshine crew. But the most delightful flick of the 2014 fest is an unconventional documentary with no plot, no dialogue, and nothing but party. Living Stars, a fleet 63-minute film…
Pamela Smart, the sexpot schoolteacher who seduced three teenage boys to shoot her husband, has been imprisoned without parole since 1991. Her official release year is sometime in 9999, assuming that human civilization is still alive. Yet the captive in Jeremiah Zagar’s Captivated: The Trials of Pamela Smart isn’t her…
© Courtesy of Sundance InstituteSixty years ago, Fred Flintstone hawked Winston cigarettes. Today, he pitches cereal. And both can kill. Stephanie Soechtig’s rabble-rousing documentary Fed Up argues that it’s time to attack Big Sugar just like we successfully demonized Big Tobacco. Narrated by Katie Couric, Fed Up is the first…
© Beth Dubber, Courtesy of Sundance InstituteKristen Stewart in Camp X-Ray.Kristen Stewart spent five Twilight films getting rescued by werewolves and vampires. Consider Camp X-Ray her rebuttal to a half-decade of playing damsels in distress. As Guantanamo guard Private Cole, Stewart is punched, bloodied, and spat on — and that’s…
If it were the late ’70s, and you were a wunderkind film artist a bit embarrassed about your zeal for space-opera kids’ stuff, you went out and bagged yourself a great to class your movie up: Alec Guinness; François Truffaut; Max von Sydow done up like a disco gladiolus. That…
“You are The Man?” a crook asks Ice Cube as the cop comedy Ride Along opens. “I am the man!” Cube insists. You can’t blame him for being defensive. Now a 44-year-old father of five, Cube is three decades away from the furious teenager who co-founded N.W.A. his senior year…
Russians still make the best movie villains. Since 9/11, Hollywood has been queasy about giving us fictional baddies from Arab countries — the line between cheap stereotypes and real-life religious extremism is too blurry, too delicate. South American drug lords have had their day, and Albanians in bad sweaters just…
One of the best performances of the year was from the tiny lifeboat in Captain Phillips.On Thursday, this year’s Oscar nominations will be announced, also known as national Gah! What Were Those Idiot Voters Thinking Day. We can’t wait, so in the meantime, we give you this:…
Like an indie oasis in the desert of mega-cine 30-screen Real-D IMAX cinemas, Harkins Camelview 5 was almost too good for its own good. Specializing in art house, independent, and foreign flicks that you really couldn’t see in any other theater in metro Phoenix, Camelview likely served as a date…
They were golden. They were globe-y. What can we say? Tina Fey and Amy Poehler hosted the 71st annual Golden Globes Sunday night, and it was a weird, hilarious, tipsy (for some), and beautiful mess. The co-hosts were on-point both dress-wise and joke-wise (that supermodel vagina joke was tops), Julia…
A tale of love complicated — if not thwarted — by prior responsibilities, intractable barriers, and the rigid high-society norms that frustrate its Victorian characters’ attempts to live as they so desperately want, The Invisible Woman finds Ralph Fiennes proving as adept behind the camera as he is in front…
January! Just the time to snuggle up with a 3D sword-and-pectoral extravaganza. And although some of its more imaginative plot details would make Edith Hamilton blanch, Renny Harlin’s Legend of Hercules fulfills every silly, flimsy promise that it makes in the first place: There are lots of battles (albeit rather…
The terrible reality of modern life is that even beautiful young people on a first date can’t go a whole evening without checking their phones. We need to be potentially connected to every possibility at all times; just allowing the present to happen has become increasingly foreign. That’s the idea…
If you’re a person alive in this age, Ralph Fiennes has at some point probably made you hate him. As the Nazi Amon Goeth in 1993’s Schindler’s List, Fiennes embodied one of history’s great evils, somehow making being utterly detestable compelling. In Martin McDonagh’s riotous, under-regarded In Bruges, Fiennes spat…
By Kiko Martinez She may not have fully understood what it meant to be an actress when she was only 5 years old, but somehow Kaitlyn Dever instinctively knew it was what she wanted to do for the rest of her life. Born in Phoenix in 1996, Dever moved to…
James, By now, your buddies have forwarded you the Reddit Ask Me Anything where a 24-year-old man with Diphallia — a.k.a. two penises — says he wants to give you a facial. Say yes…
Here’s where I write about how hard it is to draw up a 10-best list at the end of the year. Except it isn’t: I think of drawing up a list as an honor and a necessity, a way of putting 12 months of moviegoing into some sort of perspective…
I could write a Shakespearean sonnet about each film on my Top 10 of 2013, but we know we’re all here for the agreements and arguments. (Plus, have you tried writing about Joe Swanberg in iambic pentameter?) Ladies and gentlemen, let’s begin. The Act of Killing: The year’s best film…
As awards season draws nearer and best-of-the-year lists keep rolling in, there’s only one thing left to do: Get excited about what comes next. Here are 10 films you won’t want to miss in 2014. Adieu au language (Dir. Jean-Luc Godard): Jean-Luc Godard, former master of the French nouvelle vague,…
Here’s a movie that’ll flop in Kabul. Lone Survivor, the latest by Battleship director Peter Berg, is a jingoistic snuff film about a Navy SEAL squadron outgunned by the Taliban in the mountainous Kunar province. After four soldiers — played with muscles and machismo by Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Emile…
Rosemary’s Baby notwithstanding, it’s usually only white suburban people who fall prey to movie ghosts and demons — they’re always the ones opening doors to rooms that shouldn’t be entered, stepping witlessly into pentagrams painted on the floor in goat’s blood, and wondering aloud, “You think this is some sort…
This past year was a hot one. When it came to drawing the lines between cinema, erotica, and straight-up pornography, 2013 taught us that in the end that it’s really just one big clusterfuck — no pun intended. From movies to television and the big screen to privacy of your…
