Christopher Nolan’s ponderous, pontifical action movies are written less as screenplays than as operator’s manuals, guiding an audience through assembling their important themes while scrupulously making sure you don’t miss a thing. This is as true of Inception, with its reams of expositional walk-through, as of Nolan’s superhero saga, now…
In just two feature films, writer/director Joachim Trier has proved to be unparalleled in exposing the foibles and delusions of all the sad young literary men — or of one man in particular. The 20-something character played by Anders Danielsen Lie in Reprise (2006) finds immediate cult success with his…
See also: Breaking Bad Fan-Fiction: The Good, The Bad, and the Are You F#*king High? This Sunday marks the premier of the first half of Breaking Bad’s fifth and final season (yes, they’re splitting the season into two parts, because apparently they want to torture us). Following a rather explosive…
A zealous gumbo of regionalism, magical realism, post-Katrina allegory, myth, and ecological parable, Beasts of the Southern Wild, the southern Louisiana-set debut feature of 29-year-old Benh Zeitlin, rests, often cloyingly, on the tiny shoulders of Quvenzhané Wallis. Her character, Hushpuppy, the film’s 6-year-old (also Wallis’ age during filming) protagonist and…
Grab your bow and arrows and prepare to leave your hot hunting partner/best friend/maybe love behind, Hunger Games fans. We’re heading back the Arena. Lionsgate, the entertainment studio behind the first movie based on the three-part book series, has announced the release dates for the final two installments of the…
See also: Jackalope Ranch film coverage See also: Five Must-See Movies in July After a summer of Blockbusters, the Valley should be more than ready to welcome the lineup of 36 international films set for screening this October at the 12th Annual Scottsdale International Film Festival. The titles of 20…
The season premiere of Breaking Bad is a just five days away, and truthfully, it couldn’t have come sooner. We’ve been crawling the walls since the climax of Season 4, and in the 10 long months between then and now, we’ve engaged in some pretty heinous, borderline creepy activities to…
Come on Scottsdale, let’s go for three. Next Thursday the Valley will welcome (or at least, will host) casting producers from ABC’s hit reality dating show, The Bachelor. They’ll be looking for 25 women to wine, dine, and date their way into a single man’s heart. And if you watched…
The spider becomes a man — and a joy — in The Amazing Spider-Man. The Amazing Spider-Man, an inexcusably good reboot from director Marc Webb, celebrates the heartwarming arachno-genetic bar mitzvah in which a boy becomes a spider and a spider becomes a man, a rite of passage last observed…
In Woody Allen’s new film, To Rome With Love, people — like, really young people — still talk, improbably, about “neuroses.” Horny, middle-age businessmen actually stand around the water cooler and ogle the hot secretary, as in the Playboy cartoons of the ancients. In the Allen Legendarium, Freudian psychiatrists never…
“Welcome to the recession, boys,” says John Travolta’s DEA-double-agent profiteer in Oliver Stone’s Savages, based on Don Winslow’s novel. Savages is a movie of its moment, though both its good guys and bad guys (if there’s really even a difference) are unquestionably the 1 percent of their industry — that…
From bubblegum-bi-curious novelty “I Kissed a Girl” on, Katy Perry has built a career on glorious brain-dead-with-a-wink odes to playacting in a fantasy space of total acceptance and no consequences, sold to children with literal sugarcoating. Her hits are powerful stuff, coming from an artist who was raised by Pentecostal…
According to Spider-Man movies, the greatest triumph that Spider-Man ever achieves is finding it within himself to arachnid up every day. Has any other hero ever moped so much about being gifted with superstrength, -agility, and -love interests? This from a guy who can swing on his wrists’ magic ejaculate…
See also: Seven Favorite Spots to See a Film in Phoenix See also: On Its Centennial, Paramount Pictures Celebrates Its Peak: The 1970s Sometimes a movie screens for one night only, and sometimes it shows for weeks, even months, on end. That’s why when it comes to moviegoing, planning ahead…
There’s no better escape than the one found in a theater seat in front of a large screen. Great films take their audiences to cool, faraway places with interesting characters and captivating stories. Sure, you can hit up your local big box for the latest Hollywood hit, but if you’re…
Fans of Seth MacFarlane’s Fox mainstay Family Guy who wish he would run afoul of FCC regulations every week might be pleased with Ted, the story of a 35-year-old man and his foul-talking teddy bear. Plushies, too, might be turned on by the pot-smoking, whore-banging CGI toy ursus of the…
When Channing Tatum stood up and revealed his bare ass to the camera a minute or two into Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike — which the actor conceived of and produced based on his own experience as a teenage dancer in an all-male exotic revue — the audience in my screening…
For many, especially black people who see in her a mockery of our own grandmothers, Tyler Perry’s Madea is little more than a mammy — an insult to the matriarchal community figure that Perry claims to celebrate. And unforgivably, when compared to Flip Wilson’s Geraldine or even Martin Lawrence’s Big…
Beginning with a bilious toast and ending with a group hug, Lynn Shelton’s Your Sister’s Sister, her fourth film, expertly makes us squirm for about half its running time only to soothe us with empty pop-psych declarations. In Shelton’s previous feature, the bolder Humpday, two straight guys, in a moment…
Lean, fast-moving, and filled with game-changing fight sequences that have a brutally beautiful (or beautifully brutal) quality, Gareth Evans’ Indonesian martial arts film The Raid: Redemption lives up to its viral hype and the buzz it generated at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival. Rama (Iko Uwais) is a rookie…
Like Amir Bar-Lev’s The Tillman Story (2010), Kirby Dick’s The Invisible War scathingly indicts U.S. military culture. Yet the focus of each documentary is vastly different in scale: one person as opposed to one gender. Bar-Lev examines the exploitation of the corpse of Pat Tillman, the highly principled pro footballer…
Nora Ephron was a producer, director, screenwriter, journalist, novelist, playwright, author, and blogger best known for creating classic American romantic comedies and penning columns for New York magazine and Esquire and New York Times Magazine. She died last night from pneumonia, a complication resulting from acute myeloid leukemia at the…
