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…
The Social Network is a wonderful title, at once Olympian in its detachment and self-descriptive in its buzz. Everyone will opine (and Tweet) on this Scott Rudin-produced, Aaron Sorkin-scripted, David Fincher-directed, universally anticipated tale of Facebook’s genesis and founding genius — at least until something sexier comes along. The main…
Photo by Cyndi CoonWith the ongoing popularity of Antiques Road Show, Pawn Stars and American Pickers, we knew the next guilty pleasure, trash-or-treasure show to come was a reality TV auction show. TLC knew too. The cable channel has a new show, Auctioneer$, in their line up this fall. But…
Jack Goes Boating is Philip Seymour Hoffman’s movie — it’s his directorial debut; he stars as its namesake sad sack; he wears his hair in those terrible dreadlocks that he covered with a big woolen hat at the Oscars last spring — but let’s talk about John Ortiz instead. Yes,…
It was the best of TIFFs, it was the worst of TIFFs. While the trade pubs breathlessly trumpeted the flurry of deals that took place at the Toronto International Film Festival, an epidemic of grumbling had spread through press and industry screenings. Key complaints concerned the quality of the lineup…
Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps doesn’t have the clean, fable-like arc of its predecessor, the tale of the Fox and the Gekko (Charlie Sheen’s upstart broker Bud, Michael Douglas’ Wall Street player Gordon). Only the buccaneer charisma of Douglas’ signature role obscured the “Clean business, clean soul” moral…
What is Catfish? That question is an implicit part of the film’s marketing campaign, which, with the tagline, “Don’t let anyone tell you what it is,” teases a big reveal. The answer depends on whom you ask. Shot on-the-fly by Ariel “Rel” Schulman and Henry Joost, the film chronicles an…
Someone planning film screenings around the Valley has a sense of humor.In the next couple of weeks, audiences can expect one of the scariest movies of all time, a sing-along, animated Disney classic, and a musical documentary about the Jewish culture of Poland to hit local theaters.”Beauty and the Beast”…
Recording a three-day competition in Lyon, France, in which sugar is heated, stretched, and blown into delicate, rococo shapes, Kings of Pastry has none of the shame-and-humiliation rituals of reality TV cook-offs like Top Chef, no dishy Padma Lakshmi to coolly eliminate hopefuls. Though Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s food-fetishizing…
Directing himself as a verifiable big-movie lead after some time in supporting-actor Triple A ball, director-star Ben Affleck models a full line of warm-up suits to play Doug MacRay, a second-generation blue-collar stickup man, brains of his four-man bank crew. The setting is Charlestown, the square-mile majority-Irish Boston neighborhood that…
Jared Leto got some love at the VMAs Sunday night with his band 30 Seconds to Mars, but a decade ago he was portraying a drug addict spinning out of control alongside Jennifer Connelly and Marlon Wayans in an artsy (and crazy-depressing) flick called Requiem for a Dream. Thursday night,…
One week, five minutes. Those are the rules in a nutshell for the Campus MovieFest, where ASU students are invited to borrow free equipment for one week courtesy of the fest, churn out a five minute film, then submit their mini-vision for a chance to win a slice of $400,000…
Wikimedia CommonsOld people may look harmless, but beware…Although elderly people in films are usually portrayed as benign and lovable, sometimes an old character comes along that’s way too creepy, like the Reverend Henry Kane in Poltergeist II, the decaying lady in the bath tub from The Shining, and the terrible…
Amazing fashion, sexy celebrities, hard partying, drugs, a downward spiral — fashion designer, Halston’s life was filled with the elements good stories are made of.This weekend, the Phoenix Art Museum’s Arizona Costume Institute Nouveau Division is presenting a one-time showing of the documentary of Halston’s life, Ultrasuede: In Search of…
I’m Still Here — “that Joaquin Phoenix movie” — capitalizes on an anxiety that’s very of-the-moment, uniting pop cultural phenomena as seemingly disparate as the too-stupid/good-to-be-true Jersey Shore characters, James Franco’s baffling side careers as a professional student and soap opera stud, and pretty much every thing having to do…
Lebanon, written and directed by Samuel Maoz, is not just the year’s most impressive first feature but also the strongest new movie of any kind I’ve seen in 2010. Actually, Lebanon — which won the Golden Lion at Venice, after being rejected by Berlin and Cannes — hardly seems like…
