Although the Phoenix Film Festival is a locally run event, the movies shown feature talent from all over. It was refreshing to see one film that was made by a local, Elise Salomon. Her documentary about L.A.-area indie record label Wild Records and its close-knit group of artists is a…
We’ve been getting swarmed with World War Z news recently — a trailer, a poster, and various stills surfaced this week from the summer blockbuster set for release June 21. The more we see of this movie, the more it seems like an action film with a side of zombies…
Patrick Fischler (currently of Californication) and wife Lauren Bowles (True Blood) have established impressive résumés in Hollywood, but their new short film The Test (screening this Friday and Saturday at the Phoenix Film Festival) is first time the pair has tried their hands at executive producing and writing for film…
Hopefully your Phoenix Film Festival list of movies to see isn’t already full, because you’re going to want to add Fight Like a Girl, a film told from a first person perspective about the greatly unknown world of women’s boxing. We talk with the film’s director and star, Jill Morley,…
Roger Ebert was an American film critic, screenwriter, and journalist whose columns and reviews appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times and were syndicated in more than 200 newspapers across the country. Ebert made a name for himself in the candid and no-apology approach he had toward film review, earning him a…
Pass the popcorn. Here are five movies you’ve gotta see this month. Kiss of the Damned @ Harkins Scottsdale 101 There are a few reasons Kiss of the Damned is on our must-see list. It’s directed by Xan Cassavetes, daughter of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands. Milo Ventimiglia (a.k.a. Rory…
The Place Beyond the Pines opens with a close-up of Ryan Gosling’s chiseled abdomen — surely one of the more salable quantities in movies today — and heavy breathing on the soundtrack (or was that just the person next to me in the screening room?). Then in a single, five-minute…
The hills of Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills are a barren canvas of straw grass and leafless trees, framed by a winter’s sky. Nothing, it would seem, can grow here — save for fanatical faith. It is on this barren land that a priest known as Papa (Valeriu Andriuta) has…
“They do move in herds,” Sam Neill marvels, purportedly gazing at his director’s miracle dinosaurs but in reality directing his wonderment right into the camera — and right out at us, the viewers whose herdability made such smash successes of Jurassic Parks one and two. (Our failure to turn out…
“Can you speak up a little, man? I dove off a boat yesterday, and I now have an immense amount of water in my ear!” Brady Corbet, 24, is on the phone from the Republic of Panama, where he’s filming a new movie opposite Benicio del Toro and Josh Hutcherson…
For a guy who has spent a lot of time planning how to brutally murder people in the woods, the most shocking thing about Fede Alvarez is his well-adjusted nature. As the co-writer and director of Evil Dead, the new remake of the 1981 gore classic The Evil Dead, Alvarez…
Tattoo Nation documentarian Eric Schwartz isn’t inked himself — “I’m nicknamed ‘The Virgin,’ ” he admits — but when he started photographing tattoo conventions, he stumbled across an untold, half-century history of color and style inextricably linked to California. Unlike the permanent art they’ve created, these tattoo artists and their clients…
By Mad Men’s fifth season, Betty Draper had walked out of our lives, and a much plumper Betty Francis had waddled in. The audience response to this swollen version of a once-slender character: a collective cringe. Suddenly Betty became a joke. In no time, a parody of Ram Jam’s “Black…
Soap operas are more wondrous and ridiculous than you may realize, especially if you’re under the misapprehension that soaps — especially daytime ones — revolve around nothing but steamy affairs, unplanned pregnancies, and Maury-style DNA tests. In fact, we thought the same, until we started watching General Hospital to catch…
Four years ago, on assignment for The Comics Journal, I asked Robert Kirkman a tough question about his Walking Dead comic series, a question that now, after the TV adaptation’s third season finale, is still resonant: Why are all the strong female characters either crazy or dead? His response, from…
Go catch a free bike-themed feature presentation this week at Mitchell Park during the Cycle-In Cinema screenings. Breaking Away, the 1979 classic about putting the sneaker to the pedal and getting super aero, is up for review tonight with Beijing Bicycle playing Thursday night. See Also: – Cycle: April Is…
If you’re a horror film buff or lover of science fiction, The International Horror and Sci-Fi Film Festival is bound to suit your fancy. The festival will be held concurrently with the Phoenix Film Festival next week, April 4 through 11, at Harkins Scottsdale 101. See also: – A Survival…
If real life were like Wrong, Quentin Dupieux’s sweetly unnerving experiment in ambient fucked-uppedness, your phone would ring before you’ve finished this sentence, and the words you haven’t gotten to yet would be read aloud to you by a voice you’ve never heard before. Then, while you’re at lunch someplace,…
Life goes inexorably, chillingly on. The Up series, Michael Apted’s famous calendrical march, presses on now into its eighth episode, with the same dozen or so Brits from across the class spectrum once again interviewed about their lives after the usual seven-year interval. Suddenly, all these pitiable souls, subjected for…
What must Bruce Willis have felt when he discovered that his seven or so minutes of G.I. Joe: Retaliation screen time offer much more agreeable Bruce Willis-ness than the entirety of A Good Day to Die Hard? Or that his cameo, shot two years back and rich with quips and…
Kids born in 1992 can buy beer now, and according to the usual timeline of nostalgia, this means that the fetishization of all things ’90s is already well under way. And though John Dies at the End is assuredly a product of today’s online world, it feels remarkably like the…
Across America this weekend, wives and girlfriends will accompany their fellas to G.I. Joe: Retaliation, as boys-shooting-boys movies are considered movies for everyone, their violent heroism the default American fantasy. How many of those fellas do you think will reciprocate with a trip to The Host, a post–alien-invasion survivalist tale…
