Like all kid protagonists in movies, Wadjda’s Wadjda wants one pure thing so much that the very concept of want shades into need. If this plucky Saudi Arabian girl (played by preteen Waad Mohammed) doesn’t get a bicycle, it seems, some fundamental quality of hers might not survive adolescence. Her…
The Scottsdale International Film Festival is back in its 13th year and full of premières, special advanced screenings, and thought-provoking documentaries from all over the world. The four-night event runs October 4 through 8 at Scottsdale’s Harkins Shea 14 Theatre and promises everything from all-star casts to special Q&A sessions…
Scottsdale’s Harkins Camelview 5, one of the longest-running movie theaters in Arizona, has been screening indie and art house flicks for a few decades now. And if a group of local historic preservationists, architecture aficionados, and longtime patrons have their way, it will keep doing so for years to come…
Phoenix Comicon’s preview night has never been the biggest part of the annual four-day fandom free-for-all. And that’s not a slight by any means. It’s always has a good turnout, typically amongst the more die-hard members of local geekdom who are eager for a peek at what’s going down in…
To paraphrase the Bee Gees, Joseph Gordon-Levitt should be dancing. He’s already done it in (500) Days of Summer, where he led an exuberant ensemble routine that out-Dr Peppered any Dr Pepper commercial. Then there was his smashing Saturday Night Live re-creation of Donald O’Connor’s “Make ‘Em Laugh” — like…
With so many violent movies and lurid movies and straight-up bad movies — most just so much murderous product — it’s rare anymore to be seized by that feeling, as a film plays, that maybe there’s a reason for this particular violent or lurid or bad movie to exist. They…
Isaiah Washington didn’t want to play John Allen Muhammad, the Beltway Sniper who triggered three weeks of terror in 2002. The man — make that murderer — felt too familiar. Like Washington, Muhammad was a veteran and a father of three. Both were analytical, observant, and quick to vent their…
When a relatively young actor dies suddenly, as James Gandolfini did in June, it’s tempting to wonder about the roles he’ll never get to play. When we didn’t know we’d be losing him so soon, it was always fun to see Gandolfini show up, a casual surprise: In 2012 alone…
The last time Metallica made a documentary, they let the cameras into their therapy sessions, their private lives, their struggles with their families. It wasn’t good for their image, but it made for a compelling film. This time they reverse tactics. In Metallica: Through the Never, the most immersive concert…
Kids are assholes, or at least cartoons think so. Animation has inked a grand tradition of cruelty, from Wile E. Coyote’s countless failed firebombings to modern-day kiddy cash-grabs where the most common punchline is a fall or a fart. Can’t we all just get along? In Cody Cameron and Kris…
Mild spoilers up to The Bridge’s ninth episode below. Artisanal murders are all the rage these days. On Showtime’s Dexter, NBC’s Hannibal, and Fox’s The Following, small-batch, labor-intensive, sold-with-a-story slaughters have become TV’s equivalent of the Cronut. Handsome, intelligent, and mannered as court eunuchs, serial killers have become the new…
It’s 1976, a year when all the groovy girls are traipsing around in tiny suede skirts and all the cool guys have Badfinger hair. One of those guys was English racing driver James Hunt, the charismatic rapscallion who won that year’s Formula One World Championship — the embroidered badge on…
Lizzy Caplan as Virginia Johnson and Michael Sheen as William MastersIn 1957, the same year that The Ed Sullivan Show refused to shoot Elvis below the waist, a gynecologist and a former nightclub singer began hooking strangers up to electrodes and asking them to fuck in the name of science…
“If they made a movie, Holden wouldn’t like it,” Martin Sheen opines deep into the new documentary Salinger. He’s speaking of the possibility of a film adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye, a disastrous idea that J.D. Salinger prevented in both life and death. Sheen could be talking about…
Forbidden fruit has never seemed more poisonous than in Thanks for Sharing, a remarkably sensitive and surprisingly romantic ensemble drama about sex addiction. A winsome mix of funny, harrowing, and smart, it’s most commendable for making characters who are addicted to bad behavior — and who refuse to blame themselves…
If five Oscar nominees lose two young girls in the woods, will their wailing make a sound? That’s the key question of Prisoners, Denis Villeneuve’s prestigious puffery about a father (Hugh Jackman) and a cop (Jake Gyllenhaal) trying to catch a kidnapper. Prisoners is a dog-whistle for Academy voters keyed…
Written, produced, directed, and edited by Rena Riffel, who also reprises her role as Penny from the original Showgirls,Showgirls 2: Penny’s From Heaven has been available on VOD for at least a year but now is being released on DVD from Wild Eye Releasing, thus conferring onto it the legitimacy…
Yesterday, AMC announced the network would debut a spin-off of its incredibly popular show, The Walking Dead, in 2015. This comes hot on the heels of AMC announcement from last week that they would be spinning off the character of Saul Goodman from Breaking Bad…
Fall is the most wonderful time of year. The schools are back in session, the storms prevent Phoenicians from commenting on the dry heat, and the leaves turn colors in pictures from other parts of the country where trees grow. However, the best part of the season comes somewhere between…
The self-proclaimed “psychedelic soldiers of the VHS realm” and all-around mad geniuses behind the found footage/puppeteering/live show extravaganza Everything Is Terrible! again is touring the country. While preaching the gospel of randomness, they’re putting out two new film series — one focusing on the dark and sometimes ridiculously closed-minded world…
It’s a weird miracle that Johnny Cash and his primitive twosome banged out music that still feels so full and vital today. And it’s a weird miracle that My Father and the Man in Black is itself full and vital, despite throwing off all sorts of vanity-project warning signs: It’s…
We’ll always have Iron Man, they must be telling each other in Hollywood. As summer wanes, the hulking corpses of would-be blockbusters litter the home-video distribution channels like fallen Kaiju from Guillermo Del Toro’s giant-‘bots-vs.-giant-beasts movie Pacific Rim, the most enjoyable of 2013’s many urban-renewing summer blockbusters. In Del Toro’s…
