As a young boy, I had many different plans for when I grew up. As I grew older, I began to realize that not all of them were particularly realistic. My parents refused to cooperate with my plans to become Batman. Star Fleet would probably not exist in my lifetime,…
The Israeli arranged-marriage drama Fill the Void begins as a spy caper. Eighteen-year-old Shira (Hadas Yaron) and her mother (Irit Sheleg) play P.I. at the supermarket, observing a handsome asthmatic with gold-rim glasses and a gawky frame to see if he’s marriage material. Satisfied with the way he reads the…
Terrorizing children in their bedrooms remains the existential concern of the toothy blobs, hams, and pom-pom-furred Wild Things that populate Monsters movies, many of whom look like gummy nothings long stuck to the bottom of Pixar’s junk drawer. Their very lives depend upon coaxing night-screams from human kids, a premise…
Delicacy of touch isn’t a particularly valued commodity among American filmmakers. We like pioneer swagger in our directors; particularly in the age of the blockbuster, open-ended questions and eyelash-fringe feelings are suspect. That’s why it’s always been hard to know how to categorize Sofia Coppola, one of our most gifted…
A bewitching helix of pure movie stuff, Peter Strickland’s seething and self-conscious whatsit Berberian Sound Studio may scan as a psychological thriller, but it’s really a lavish gift to film geeks in a lovely matryoshka box. We haven’t been here before: the Italian film industry circa 1976, in that post-dubbing-craze…
Used to be to get famous in the rightwing blowhard racket, you had to have an act. Not today. Has anyone ever once thought, “Oh, I can’t wait to hear what Sean Hannity’s going to say next”? (Or “squeak next,” in Hannity’s case.) Consider this scene from the funny, arresting…
“You cannot build a business on copyright infringement,” points out Ian Rogers, the CEO of Topspin, not too long into Downloaded, director Alex Winter’s too-breezy account of Napster, the teensy app that liberated digital music, destroyed the record industry, and swallowed some $500 million worth of loans and seed money…
Rama Burshtein’s Fill the Void opens on green leaves, smiling faces, lush billows of fabric that when pieced together, the sensuous images accumulating into a fuller picture, become a wedding dress, tulle and silk diffusing the glow. Engagements, weddings, births, and deaths: This film is a more traditional kind of…
In Joss Whedon’s The Avengers, Iron Man gets off a good burn on Thor during their intramural fight in the woods: “Shakespeare in the park?” he says. “Doth mother know you weareth her drapes?” Like any good Shakespearean pastiche, The Avengers began in media res, with a glowy cube thing…
Destruction is scary, but not half as scary as the act of rebuilding, the moment of looking at the random, jagged pieces you’ve got left and wondering how the hell you’re going to fit them together. In Marc Forster’s World War Z, the world as we know it — or…
Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel is a movie event with an actual movie inside, crying to get out. Despite its preposterous self-seriousness, its overblown, CGI’ed-to-death climax, and its desperate efforts to depict the destruction of, well, everything on Earth, there’s greatness in this retelling of the origin of Superman, moments…
From the peak of Anchorman to the nadir of The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, the formula for studio comedies of the last 20 years has been simple: Dude acts like a dick for an hour, turns blandly sweet toward the end, and then everyone on the DVD commentary can claim to…
Judy Blume’s first novel, The One in the Middle is the Green Kangaroo, was published in 1969, yet it’s only now, 44 years later, that the first big-screen adaptation of her work—Tiger Eyes, based on 1981’s novel of the same name—finally opens in theaters. This is a disgrace. One can…
Last week, EW columnist Mark Harris tweeted a statistic disturbing to anyone who cares about gender equality on the big screen: “It’s now been 61 days since the last wide release of a major studio movie starring a woman.” Unfortunately, that number will only increase—to 84 days—until Sandra Bullock and…
Sometimes, there’s just too damn much to say about a movie than can fit into any one review. (Even Stephanie Zacharek’s exhaustive, excellent one.) So, here’s more: Stephanie Zacharek, our lead film critic, and film editor Alan Scherstuhl hashing over all the portentous craziness in Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel…
Take seat, cinephiles. Moviegoing on Mill Avenue is about to get a whole lot better. That’s because AMC announced plans to open a movie theater in fall of 2013 on Tempe’s main drag at Centerpoint on Mill, a complex that features housing, retail, and nightlife elements. See also: Phoenix Art…
Women around the globe probably give at least a little credit to Judy Blume for helping them navigate the treacherous path to adulthood ever since she published her first book back in 1969. Blume has addressed issues like buying your first bra, bullying, divorce, masturbation, and teen sex with a…
Note: This post contains spoilers. Game of Thrones is arguably best known for its brutally violent scenes. Last week’s “Red Wedding” episode is a stark (har har) example of just how horrific the show can get. The first season’s baby-killing scenes most certainly turned a lot of people off to…
Here’s a category idea for bar trivia: Collect one-sentence plot summaries of young-adult novel series and R-rated horror films, and see who can distinguish which from which. The one where the kids kill each other for sport is approved by school districts for extra-credit reading, as is the one where…
After completing five months of principal photography on The Avengers, Joss Whedon flew back to Los Angeles and threw himself a welcome-home party. As the guests circled his pool, he asked friends like Firefly’s Nathan Fillion, Angel’s Amy Acker, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Alexis Denisof if they were busy…
Now Open After Earth: While it’s not being advertised as “An M. Night Shyamalan Film,” this big-budget science fiction flick was helmed and co-written by the once-promising filmmaker. Will Smith and son Jaden co-star as space-age foragers on a post-human Earth. The ads suggests this is a Karate Kid-like vanity project…
George R. R. Martin took a break from killing Starks today to send us this list of the notes he would send to the producers of TV shows if he were put in charge of them. [NOTE: We made this up.] Here’s what he dashed off for us, in between…
