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…
There are three guys and two girls left.And this is the second to the last episode. It’s Rich that describes them as a family, and by tomorrow, two of them will be gone. Yeah, my stale M&M heart gets melty; it’s a sweet sentiment that shows more personality that the…
Steve McQueen’s first two films both star Michael Fassbender, feature virtually interchangeable titles, and are nearly as grueling to watch as they must have been to make. But where Shame might be nearly as excruciating as 2008’s Hunger, it’s a lot less exalted. In Hunger, Fassbender’s imprisoned Irish revolutionary Bobby…
The movies are full of bed-hopping men — think of Humphrey Bogart’s serial flirtations in The Big Sleep (1946), and Richard Roundtree laying his way uptown and down in Shaft (1971). But in Steve McQueen’s Shame, womanizing is not just an outgrowth of the plot — it is the plot…
Although supplying boy’s adventure thrills on the side, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories are remarkable for how they make the process of empirical brainwork, and the resulting discoveries, breathlessly exciting. Each Holmes tale simultaneously unlocks a mystery while deepening the enigma of its hero in a miraculously sustained piece…
Suit up and grab your leg lamp — Mesa’s Royale and Nile theaters are pairing up to host a special holiday screening of A Christmas Story inside The Nile. On Thursday, December 22, escape the holiday party, bring the kids (and maybe some ear muffs, a few lawn chairs and blankets)…
In a high-rise apartment in downtown Minneapolis, Mavis Gary (played by Charlize Theron) — young adult fiction author, divorcee, and aging prom queen — takes a morning swill of Diet Coke and peels off last night’s As-Seen-on-TV, stick-on bra. After a Wii Fit step program in roomy sweats, she checks her…
And then were six. I will admit, the number of contestants on Lifetime’s Project Accessory looks significantly smaller as they are seated next to the runway as host Molly Sims explains the challenge for this week. And surprise! It’s like every other challenge from six weeks prior, make a (fill…
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…
Described as a “psychotic prom-queen bitch,” the anti-heroine of Young Adult is a prize part that affords Charlize Theron one of the season’s prize performances — although, to judge from the voting at the New York Film Critics Circle conclave last week, few of my colleagues seem to agree. Perhaps…
Garry Marshall gives you what you came for. “A dollar’s work for a dollar’s pay,” is how Marshall mainstay Hector Elizondo puts it in The Flamingo Kid. Although he started as a TV joke writer alongside Mel Brooks and Woody Allen, this 77-year-old Bronx baby never blossomed into an auteur…
In the arrested-development dramedy Young Adult, actor-comedian Patton Oswalt faces his biggest career challenge to date: holding his own against Oscar-winning starlet Charlize Theron. Reteaming Juno director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody, the film stars Theron as Mavis, a misanthropic, hot mess of a YA-novel ghostwriter who returns to…
I had a revelation last night: Project Accessory is an exceptional show. While the formula remains a mystery, this little reality show has successfully bent, ravaged, and discounted the laws of the universe. It defies natural logic and everything that makes sense, because a show about purses, shoes and jewelry should not…
The first thing you see in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia is a tight close-up of Kirsten Dunst’s face. Behind her, slow as molasses, birds are dropping from the sky. Brueghel’s The Flight of Icarus turns leisurely to ash; a passage from Tristan und Isolde swells on the soundtrack as lightning…
Lars von Trier is not for everyone. You have only to watch von Trier’s violently quirky short film Occupations — featuring von Trier brutally murdering the man talking in the movie theater next to him — to see that he’s wildly passionate about his work, and yeah, a little bit uninhibited. The…
If you caught last month’s Zócalo Public Square in Scottsdale and want a refresher — or missed it and want to see what all the talk was about, tune into C-SPAN tonight at 10 p.m.. The discussion, held in the SMoCA Lounge in October, posed the question “Is Arizona the Front…
