The Iron Lady: Margaret Thatcher as victimized woman In the first scene of The Iron Lady, which re-teams director Phyllida Lloyd with her Mamma Mia! star Meryl Streep, 80-something Margaret Thatcher is presented as a little old lady unfit for the fast-moving world outside her hermetic London townhouse. The bulk…
A holy hot mess of the sacred and the inane, Joyful Noise, about a small-town Southern gospel choir, lifts from Usher’s “Yeah!” to give us this inspirational lyric: “Now God and I are the best of homies.” The film is Jesus for Gleeks — no surprise, since writer-director Todd Graff’s…
The first 10 minutes of Dee Rees’ funny, moving, nuanced, and impeccably acted first feature, in which coming of age and coming out are inseparable, sharply reveal the conflicts that 17-year-old Alike (Adepero Oduye) faces. At a lesbian club — maybe for the first time — she gapes in awe…
One of the biggest success stories of the 2011 Sundance Film Festival was writer-director Dee Rees’ film Pariah, about 17-year-old black lesbian Alike (pronounced Ah-lee-kay, played by Adepero Oduye) and her struggles to forge an identity from the constricting butch/femme palette. Her best friend Laura (a scene-stealing Pernell Walker) has…
Will there someday be a movie where the “one last job” goes off without a hitch? Not Contraband, anyway, which begins with that time-tested premise, then subjects its protagonist to a feature-length demonstration of Murphy’s Law. Chris Farraday (Mark Wahlberg) is the retiree runner reluctantly reactivated, a legend who once…
Reality shows revolving around the lives of fill-in-the-blank wives are cable mainstays and ratings boons for networks like Bravo and Vh1. While the former pioneered the spousal genre with Real Housewives of Orange County back in 2006, Vh1 has since hopped on the wifey dramas bandwagon with skank/scum-starring dramas like…
Victor Moreno says he remembers checking out Andrea Beesley Brown’s Grindhouse Redux double features and events at the Paper Heart and Chandler Cinemas back when he first moved to Phoenix. The local movie fanatic and artist started programming with Beasley Brown (aka The Midnite Movie Mamacita) when she opened The Royale…
The YouTube trailer for a Scottsdale-based reality television show, un-originally (and uh, well, somewhat inaccurately) titled Hottsdale, has been making its way around the internet. First, a few answers for the guaranteed questions: – Yes, it’s a real concept. – Yes, they’ve successfully lured a cast of actors, er, real life people to act, er,…
Sometimes it’s a one-night deal, and sometimes they stick around for weeks, so when it comes to seeing an independent film at a local theater, planning ahead is crucial.That’s why we’ve wrangled must-see flicks screening in the Valley this month. Prep your bowl of buttery popcorn and check out our…
We know — you’re excited about The Dark Knight Rises. And The Avengers. And The Hunger Games. So are we. We’re also excited about a lot of other movies whose marketing campaigns have not inundated us with white noise (yet). Allow us to suggest a few more films to put…
The past 12 months brought a number of powerful, introspective, big-theme cine-statements, many of them by old masters (see below). Some pondered history — as well as its end. A few upended the old-fashioned movie-house paradigm. In recognition of the medium’s ongoing mutation, my annual list is bookended by two…
Margaret, written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan (You Can Count on Me), starring Anna Paquin with key supporting performances from Matt Damon and Mark Ruffalo, is the best film of 2011. Chances are very, very good that you haven’t seen it — or were even aware that it was something…
We know — you’re excited about The Dark Knight Rises. And The Avengers. And The Hunger Games. So are we. We’re also excited about a lot of other movies whose marketing campaigns have not inundated us with white noise (yet). Allow us to suggest a few more films to put…
Grab your plastic, intergalactic ray gun and your handmade space suit — the worst space crew in the galaxy is coming to FilmBar. Voyage Trekkers, the local sci-fi comedy web series directed by Nathan Blackwell and produced by Squishy Studios and Inside Creative Minds Media, will screen all 10 episodes on Saturday, January 7. …
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is hardly a personal project. Still, David Fincher’s sveltely malevolent remake of the 2009 Swedish blockbuster directed by Niels Arden Oplev from Stieg Larsson’s rambling thriller, a posthumously published international bestseller and Kindle record-holder, is a recognizably Fincherian caper. The movie, which opens with…
For 15 years and now four sequels, Tom Cruise has pilgrimaged regularly to the Mission: Impossible franchise. Like a Hindu’s rejuvenating bath in the Ganges, a dip in the series serves to wash away perceived doubts about the star’s enduring fame and clout. The sustained box office of the M:I…
An undeniably charming homage to Hollywood in the late 1920s, The Artist probably will be the most successful silent movie since the days of the Gish sisters. It might also be the first silent film many of its viewers have ever seen. French writer-director Michel Hazanavicius, who has previously struck…
John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the 1974 spy novel generally regarded as the writer’s finest, is predicated on a pair of enigmatic personalities: the colorless bureaucratic master-spook George Smiley and the double agent the Soviets have planted near the top of British intelligence whom Smiley must unmask. Although…
A doggedly overwrought production less felt than facile, Steven Spielberg’s War Horse is an essentially uninvolving prestige adaptation. It might be perverse to accuse a tearjerker as accomplished as Spielberg of being unfeeling. But the overcalculation with which he mechanically trots out one of his most familiar tropes for what…
When I told someone I was off to a screening of We Bought a Zoo the other day, the response was an eye roll. The reaction’s understandable: Save for two music docs — an Elton John-Leon Russell album making-of and that Pearl Jam anniversary infomercial — Cameron Crowe has been…
“They were experimenting on themselves,” says David Cronenberg, with no small amount of satisfaction, about the psychoanalytic all-stars of his superb new film, A Dangerous Method. It’s the dawn of the 20th century, and we are present for the messy birth of psychoanalysis as handsome, ambitious Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender)…
Nerd Alert: The first trailer for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey has been released. The highly anticipated film, directed by Lord of the Rings’ Peter Jackson and based on the the 1937 novel by J. R. R. Tolkien, stars Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) who sets out on an epic adventure with…
