At around the four-minute mark of my first viewing of the Cloud Atlas trailer, as the M83 track swelled to its bursting point and a hoverbike darted through future Korea, I remember e-mailing and GChatting at least a dozen friends with a link to the preview and my take: “Holy…
S’all good, man — unless you’re calling real-life Washington D.C. lawyer Saul Goodman on a busy Tuesday afternoon to ask dumb questions like, “Any funny stories because you share the name of a shyster lawyer on a popular TV show?” Turns out the “Breaking Bad” character’s namesake, an honored and…
New SNL cast member Aidy Bryant took front and center stage over the weekend in the sketch comedy show’s mock-presidential debate as moderator and CNN correspondent Candy Crowley. Bryant was signed onto SNL in September along with fellow Second City alum Tim Robinson. (Fair warning: Bryant now works in New…
Halloween is approaching fast, which means dads will be dressing themselves as bottles of Jack Daniels and their sons as packs of cigarettes, and ladies will be dressing up as sexy … anything. It also means you’re bound to be faced with a ridiculous amount of options for how to…
Objectively, what the world needs now is another teen-romance-slash-virginity-loss dramedy like we need a hole in our collective movie heads. But Jonathan Kasdan’s The First Time, against all odds, is something of a wonder, a palm-size ball of banter and irony and earnestness that never stops rolling and almost never…
English filmmaker Andrea Arnold’s atypical impressionistic approach to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is her adaptation’s main hook. As with Fish Tank and Red Road, Arnold’s last two feature-length dramas, the new Wuthering Heights is very much about the act of looking. The novel’s tempestuous plot is thus unmercifully filtered through…
British filmmaker Andrea Arnold’s remarkable new adaptation of Wuthering Heights comes packing some redoubtable weapons, including the most atmospheric ultra-realism the story has ever seen, an awesome sense of the Yorkshire landscape, and no small payload of brooding poeticism. But undoubtedly, its coup de grâce has everything to do with…
“This film was born out of the rage of not being able to make other projects,” Leos Carax says of Holy Motors, an anomaly in the French director’s oeuvre as its production was relatively stress-free. Speaking at a hotel bar in New York, Carax says, “It was imagined very quickly,…
It’s tempting to snipe that the argument of Atlas Shrugged Part II — that the genius of an unregulated free market results in the greatest of all greater goods — is somewhat undone by the chintziness of Atlas Shrugged Part II, because, seriously, if this is the best promotion of…
It’s a Sunday afternoon in New York, and Tom Tykwer and the filmmakers formerly known as the Wachowski Brothers are talking about Zardoz, that odd and ambitious 1974 science fiction drama most infamous for featuring a gun-vomiting godhead and Sean Connery in a mankini. As a film that confronts viewers…
Admit it, after months of watching a chubby redneck child compete in beauty pageants and make sketti with her family, you’ve become accustomed to a certain level of culture in TV entertainment. Now that the first season on Honey Boo Boo is over you may be wondering what other shows…
Perhaps you’ve lost faith in movies about amusingly digressive criminals. Maybe you believe it’s no longer possible to be pleasurably jolted by inventive swearing, from-no-place head shots, and post-everything structural flourishes. Certainly you have no reason to expect blood-splattered poetry or throat-clearing laughter from yet another movie in which Los…
Perhaps more than any other male American star of his generation, Ben Affleck understands the narrative advantage of having Hollywood on your side. The Good Will Hunting co-screenwriter and co-star won an Oscar at age 25 in large part because he and collaborator Matt Damon, as struggling actors who created…
Next week’s Paranormal Activity 4 continues the story of an extended American family whose members own a lot of surveillance cameras, camcorders, smart phones, baby monitors, webcams, Talkboys, and other consumer electronic devices with which they record the haunting of their nice suburban tract homes by a terrifying demonic entity…
Fred Williamson is more of a man than probably about 90 percent of the males in the world. During his seven-year stint in pro football with such teams as the Oakland Raiders and Kansas City Chiefs, he earned the nickname “The Hammer” for his aggressive, smashmouth style of play. Plus,…
If you’ve been yawning at Hollywood’s latest offerings of sequels and remakes and feeling a bit like “they don’t make ’em like they used to,” Biltmore Fashion Park may have the remedy for your movie-going blues. See Also: – Seven Favorite Spots to Catch a Movie in Phoenix – Five…
Ever since Mars Attacks!, Tim Burton mostly has been in the adaptation business, rendering dark and becurlicued Sleepy Hollows, Alice in Wonderlands, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factorys. With Frankenweenie, he adapts his own work — the first animated short he ever produced for a major film studio, and the…
“Positive characterizations are complex characterizations,” says writer-director Ava DuVernay, tucking into a serving of roasted potatoes. “That’s all we need to know. They shouldn’t be saccharine. They shouldn’t feel like medicine. You know, often films that are deemed positive, nobody wants to see them.” It’s a recent Sunday afternoon, and…
In Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths, a prune-faced, simian-mouthed sexagenarian sits by the road in an old suit and brown-patterned tie, and cradles a white bunny in his arms. This is precisely what we’ve come to expect of a Tom Waits entrance. Waits has long been one of Hollywood’s favorite sight…
The 2012 Presidential Debates are coming, the first of which is this Wednesday night, reminding us there’s no hope left for our country. Mitt Romney is telling us to “Believe in America,” which is not a bad idea. It’s similar to Stalin telling folks to “believe in Mother Russia.” Hey,…
The Vampires vs. Werewolves argument will likely continue — especially between their die-hard tween (and tween mom) fans — well beyond the end of the Twilight series. But for the fans who need a fix and a good dose of Team Kristen shenanigans, there’s Harkins’ Twi-mania. The day-long screening of…
The way films come and go, in and out of theaters, usually it’s easier to miss a movie than catch it. That makes planning ahead a must when it comes to moviegoing in the Valley. That’s also why we’ve handpicked five must-see flicks screening this month to add to the…
