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…
Next year is rapidly approaching, and the movie future is looking bright for film buffs, movie geeks, and indie flick lovers alike. Although some announcements, like Batfleck and Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman, may cast doubt in the minds of some (including us), the return of directors like Wes Anderson…
2013 was full of stellar television. Here’s a look back at the 10 best shows that aired over the past year…
Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street is the kind of movie directors make when they wield money, power, and a not inconsiderable degree of arrogance. Sprawling and extravagant, it revels in all manner of excess, including sexual debauchery, hearty abuse of liquor and Quaaludes, even dwarf-tossing. Its antihero, the…
What becomes a legend most? After prolonged incubation, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom offers the biopic’s usual reply: legend itself. Bigger, louder, more expensive legend, brought to bear by the best talents and technologies of the day. The name Nelson Mandela already shorthand for the things Mandela shows him to…
For professional film critics, you’ll notice, the year in film tends to conclude prematurely. Those “Best Of” lists you see popping up everywhere around now have often been tallied, decided, and finalized by mid-November — and in the web’s ever-harried race for clicks and pageviews, that date seems to be…
Solemn as a funeral march, humorless as your junior high principal, as Japanese as a grocery-store California roll, Keanu Reeves’ let’s-mope-about-and-kill-ourselves samurai drama has exactly three things going for it. First, the cockeyed sensuality of Rinko Kikuchi as a spider-puking evil witch who can transform herself into a fox, a…
The surprise in Grudge Match, the not-quite-a-comedy that pits Rocky Balboa against Raging Bull, isn’t that it has the chutzpah to posit a universe in which Sylvester Stallone and Robert DeNiro have, since the early ’80s, been equally matched rivals. The surprise is in how easily audiences will buy it…
In the 20 years since Reality Bites, his directorial debut, Ben Stiller has metastasized from sketch comedy lunatic to Generation X darling to blockbuster king. Among the funny men, most of whom have calcified into cliques (yawn, Anchorman 2), he’s the last of the triple-threat writer-director-stars, and the only one…
