It’s a long, long way from the women’s bar outside Berkeley, California, where Ntozake Shange first presented her combustible choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf, in December 1974, to Atlanta’s Tyler Perry Studios, where the impresario filmed much of this calamitous adaptation. Though striving…
When the Bruce family began their life together, they seemed to have everything going for them. Todd Bruce had a prosperous contracting business and two children — Heather and Levi. Laura Rumsey, a teacher and mother to five children — Bailey, Danielle and triplets Whitney, Dylan, and Rex — was…
Inside Job, Charles Ferguson’s follow-up to his Iraq War gut-twister No End in Sight, is a documentary that inspires less shock and awe than sickening ire. The movie opens with the cautionary tale of little Iceland, an idyllic nation so stable that, as put by one local, it enjoyed “almost…
When we first see Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, the final adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” trilogy, she is being transported to a hospital in Gothenburg, bloodied almost beyond recognition, the result of a bullet put in her brain by Zalachenko, her barbaric…
Here’s a secret that shouldn’t be one: Scottsdale Community College boasts one of the strongest film programs in the state. And that’s good news for local aspiring filmmakers. From 6 to 8 p.m. on Thursday, November 4, the SCC Film School is hosting an open house at the campus, located…
If you’re feeling your caffeine high starting to wane at the beginning of the work week, the Valley Art Theatre is giving an advanced, free screening of “Monsters” tonight and is hosting the Phoenix launch of UK energy drink, “Relentless.” Should be fun if you can hold still in your…
The Campus MovieFest, a student film competition we blogged about in September, has selected 16 short films by ASU students and will host a screening of them Monday evening at MADCAP Theaters. If you go, you might get a good slice of the artistic diversity within the school’s film program;…
They may not be able to get your film shown at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, but Time Warner Cable and IFC are giving the winner of its short film contest a four-night trip for two to the festival. You just have to create a 2- to 5-minute film, upload…
After Fox Searchlight’s Amelia spectacularly flamed out last October, the studio tries again to grab awards-season honors with another biopic starring and executive-produced by Hilary Swank. Gone is the Kansas-patrician enunciation and smartly tailored Depression-era trousers; as Conviction’s Betty Anne Waters, a Massachusetts high school dropout and single mom who…
Life is wonderful, death is wow, chance is weird, and Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter is a puddle of tepid ick. Is America’s last cowboy icon prospecting for more Oscar gold? Taking for his map an original screenplay by British docu-dramatist Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon), Eastwood rides a sleepy burro deep…
Photo courtesy of Tony and Janina’s American Wedding. Janina Wasilewski and her son, Brian. Filmmaker Ruth Leitman met Tony and Janina Wasilewski on what she calls “the worst day of their lives.” The Wasilewskis, Polish immigrants living in a suburb of Chicago, had just learned Janina was to be deported…
Classiest. Comic. Book. Movie. Ever. Not the best. Not the worst. Just the classiest — Helen Mirren (and Morgan Freeman and John Malkovich and Brian Cox and Richard Dreyfuss) can spruce up any pulp. As far as comic-book adaptations go, though, Red is a little closer to the bright side…
Movie stars make a living peddling distinct, definable personalities. Edward Norton, a movie star who might have enjoyed the comparative anonymity of a character actor if not for the gossip-media market value of a few of his habits (an aggressive perfectionism that has earned him a “reputation” for “being difficult,”…
You know you live in Arizona when … you can catch a nighttime, outdoor movie from October until mid-December. Every year a few valley parks set up screens and extend an open invitation to catch a free movie under the stars (so long as it isn’t raining). If you’ve been…
Phoenix’s Musical Instrument Museum announced this week that it’s expanding its globally focused M.O. to include celluloid features. Set to debut later this month, the series will include flicks that document worldwide sonic efforts, ranging from a Steinway workshop in New York to the post-tsunami musical communities of Sri Lanka,…
A film seemingly designed to get every New York City honors student face-punched at college, It’s Kind of a Funny Story chronicles a privileged Brooklyn high-schooler’s super-cool institutionalized mental-health break. Hot for his best friend’s girlfriend, stressed out over an application to a prestigious summer school, and audaciously neglectful of…
Published five years ago, Kazuo Ishiguro’s massively praised Never Let Me Go is set in an alternate universe where life has been extended and catastrophic illness eliminated, thanks to an evolutionary advance, namely the harvesting of vital organs from specially bred human clones. But that’s backstory. Despite its lurid premise,…
Kept afloat by a great cast, Woody Allen’s latest foray into the perverse follies of mankind begins with a statutory quote from Macbeth about the futility of it all. But like so much of Allen’s work over the past decade, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger is more Bergman-lite…
Davis Guggenheim’s call-to-arms documentary on the failures of the U.S. public-education system — thoroughly laudable in intention if maddening in its logic and omissions — originated with his own guilty conscience. An Academy Award winner for 2006’s An Inconvenient Truth, the director, whose debut doc, 2001’s The First Year, heralded…
Something about October must say, “It’s film festival time.” We wrote earlier about the Talk Cinema Film Series in Scottsdale starting Oct. 19. Just up the road, starting tomorrow, is the 10th Scottsdale International Film Festival, which continues through Tuesday, October 5. With 27 films from 20 countries, it might…
In the mood for some gambling? The Talk Cinema film series, a cross-city event that gives advanced screenings of independent and foreign films, will hit the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts on Oct. 19. Tickets are available now, but there’s a catch — you won’t know what movie is…
An orphan for all practical purposes, 12-year-old Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee) has been left to sprout like a weed. At home, he gets sparse recognition from his divorcée mother; at school, he absorbs castrating taunts from a pack of bullies who’ve gleaned “eternal victim” from his spacey stare. Owen fills the…
