There’s a moment at the beginning of Tower Heist, the new comedy opening Friday by director Brett Ratner (the Rush Hour series), when you can almost forget years of Eddie Murphy’s career. Murphy stands on the sidewalk taunting Ben Stiller as he passes by in his best suit (“punk-ass bitches”…
It took 19 minutes before a contestant burst into tears on last night’s premiere episode of Project Accessory, and that included seven minutes of commercial interruptions. After being allotted 15 minutes to rummage through two storage units full of stuff you’d find in the Dumpster behind Goodwill to secure materials…
On a Monday in late August, Elizabeth Olsen — younger sister of the infamous Olsen twins — and writer/director Sean Durkin sat beneath the screen at Harkins Camelview. They were in Phoenix to promote the unfortunately titled Martha Marcy May Marlene, in limited release beginning today (keep an eye out,…
“Oddly enough,” says Mitchell 20: Teacher Quality Is the Answer producer and co-director Randy Murray, “we’re blowing away the other films. A great example is — I think — a Tuesday afternoon; we had an audience of 80 at a screening, and 17 of the other theaters were completely empty,”…
Written and directed by Bruce Robinson, The Rum Diary is what the Brits might call a rum movie — an oddly inoffensive piece and a personal project for its disconcertingly unengaged star Johnny Depp. The movie adapts a novel Hunter S. Thompson began in the early ’60s and published, under…
Drowned out by the drum circles at Occupy Wall Street, writer-director J.C. Chandor’s lifeless Margin Call depicts 36 hours at a Manhattan investment firm at the dawn of the 2008 financial freak-out. Chandor’s debut feature audaciously asks us to empathize with obscenely overpaid risk analysts and their bosses, a gambit…
Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, is the close-second candidate to be attributed authorship of the 37 plays of William Shakespeare, the glover’s son turned actor from Stratford-upon-Avon — who, due to the troublesome existence of evidence, remains the general favorite. De Vere is the protagonist of Anonymous, a…
Standing outside his small-town Ohio home, his wife and child busy preparing breakfast inside, Curtis LaForche (Michael Shannon) looks up at the ominous, slate-gray sky in the first scene of Take Shelter. The clouds open, raining down oily, piss-colored droplets. It’s end-of-days weather, a phenomenon that only Curtis seems to…
It takes more than just cheap theatrics and cheesy cinematic scare tactics to frighten Andrea Beesley-Brown, co-owner of The Royale in Mesa. “I usually don’t get scared a lot by movies these days,” she says.It’s probably because Beesley-Brown’s seen close to a thousand different horror films in her lifetime (they don’t…
Head spinning and vomiting pea soup are just a couple of the Hollywood-hyped myths about exorcism that a new docudrama seeks to dispel, says producer and ASU alumnus Nick Exposito. The film, titled The Rite of Exorcism: Myths, Mystery, and Hope, opens its theatrical run today at Harkins Shea 14…
In 2009, Oren Peli’s low-budget, “found footage” thriller Paranormal Activity came out of nowhere to gross more than $100 million domestically at the box office. Not bad for a first-time filmmaker who made a $15,000 movie in his house in San Diego with two friends and sold it to Paramount…
Andrew Haigh’s smart, engaging Weekend is filled with ideas and heart, humor and sadness. Unfolding over the course of a single weekend in which handsome, melancholy lifeguard Russell (Tom Cullen) meets and falls for Glen (Chris New), a firebrand art student with prickly notions about marriage, family, sex, and art,…
The last time a beloved classic was effectively remade as a vehicle for up-and-coming British actors, and anchored by one of the grandest dames of U.K. cinema, the film was Brideshead Revisited and the dame was Emma Thompson. Audiences loved the new talent, which was framed with things they already loved…
Opening Oct. 28, Like Crazy is also a love song to old media, filled with letters and photographs and other non-digitized artifacts. Like Crazy, which hits the silver screen October 28, is a strange, delightful experiment in filmmaking. Co-written and directed by relative newcomer Drake Doremus, the film worked off…
Farrelli’s Cinema Supper Club announced on Sunday that it’s closing its doors after 10 years in business and a “huge struggle to keep Farrelli’s open between 9/11, the uncooperative movie industry, and the recession.” Farrelli’s was the lone “dinner and a movie” joint in the Valley for most of its…
In hindsight, the 1984 hit Footloose — starring Kevin Bacon and directed by Herbert Ross — along with its contemporary Flashdance, can be seen as the link between the old Hollywood model of a let’s-put-on-a-show musical, based on original songs brought to life in elaborate choreographed numbers, and the later…
Recent research suggests that swearing — as in cursing, cussing, or unleashing any stream of invective that newspaper comics would render as furious punctuation — is something more than a reflex response to life’s agonies. It might actively help to relieve those agonies. If that’s the case, then maybe it’s…
Getting into a car accident was probably the best thing that ever happened to George Lindell. After the 46-year-old local house painter was involved a nasty wreck in North Phoenix last month, he provided a extremely over-the-top interview to FOX 10 that’s been described as the “best crazy car accident description”…
A procedural on the political manipulation of medium and message, George Clooney’s fourth directorial effort is bookended with scenes of media-op prepping. In the first, Stephen Myers (Ryan Gosling), a 30-year-old campaign adviser to Democratic presidential candidate Mike Morris (Clooney), fills in for his boss at the sound check for…
Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman) is a two-bit trainer traveling the state fair circuit in a not-too-distant future. His line is robot fighting, a sport that has absorbed the audience for boxing, MMA, and, apparently, demolition derby. After a tough match leaves Charlie ‘bot-less, he gets news that his ex-girlfriend, with…
John Sayles’ Amigo aspires more to educate than entertain, but it’s no less engrossing for that. Torn from the pages of history, if not those of Sayles’ recently published, epic turn-of-the-20th-century novel A Moment in the Sun, the movie harks back to America’s first real imperial adventure — the bloody…
Buckle up, Lucille, Arrested Development is back from the dead. Creator of the short-lived but much loved series Mitch Hurwitz announced the good news at the New Yorker Festival last night: The cult comedy will return to the silver screen for a single season. The better news: after the season concludes, the highly dysfunctional…
