Some consider “amateur” to be a dirty word. I disagree. I’ve got nothing but respect for people who do something purely out of love, who don’t let their lack of training or skills get in the way of expressing their passion. One heartfelt work by an amateur is worth five…
Salt, famously the Spy Flick Rewritten for Angelina Jolie After Tom Cruise Dropped Out, has been publicized as the cinematic equivalent of the 19th Amendment: finally, a level playing field for female action stars! This is mostly bullshit, of course —Jolie’s Evelyn Salt is not the first action hero to…
Inception is a chilling trip into the psyche . . . of writer-director Christopher Nolan, an Anglo-American action director who shattered the Tomatometer of mass-consensus with The Dark Knight. Nolan’s follow-up offers more muted colors, gift-wrapped themes, and GQ leading men with stockbroker comb-backs over the frowns carved in their brows — indicators…
Serious comedy, powered by an enthusiastic cast and full of good-natured innuendo, Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right gives adolescent coming-of-age and the battle of the sexes a unique twist. It does this in part by creating a romantic triangle between a longstanding, devoutly bourgeois lesbian couple, Nic and…
For summer activities, an inside setting is often necessary. Perhaps it’s the butter-drenched popcorn or the near-arctic temperature, but summertime screams movie time and we have just the right places to cool off and catch a film. And while getting out to see a movie can be costly, especially at…
“Never ask for what ought to be offered,” 17-year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) tells her little brother in Winter’s Bone, Debra Granik’s dark and flinty Ozark fairy tale. Those are words to live by for Ree and her people, scattered across the hardscrabble crooks and hollers of the southern Missouri…
As the lights were dimming before a preview screening of Despicable Me, the 6-year-old who lives in my house leaned over and said, “I hope this is funny — not like Toy Story 3.” Now don’t misunderstand: He adored that movie. It’s just that whenever the subject comes up, the…
Remember when “hoarder” was a word one only heard when talk turned to rodents and wildlife? When a pack rat was the crazy old guy at the end of the block who never threw away his newspaper? Today, hoarders and pack rats are entertainment–and, if some of the items on…
I worry about my interest in hoarders. They are, as the stars of reality shows like A&E’s Hoarders and TLC’s Hoarding: Buried Alive, the latest in a long line of Americans–right after celebrity drug addicts, obese weight-loss competitors, and tone-deaf teenagers who think they can sing–who are being exploited for…
As unrepentantly grandiose and ludicrous as its title, Luca Guadagnino’s visually ravishing third feature suggests an epic that Visconti and Sirk might have made after they finished watching Vertigo and reading Madame Bovary while gorging themselves on aphrodisiacs. That it works so well — despite frequently risible dialogue (“Happy is…
Why is Eclipse, the third film in the Twilight series, so fantastically successful? Why does the audience shriek and moan and giggle throughout in feverish joy? Well, perhaps they’d do that no matter what, but Eclipse is the least laughable installment yet in the series, and director David Slade efficiently…
In Cyrus, a freakishly engrossing black comedy about excessively mothered men and the women who enable them, the excellent John C. Reilly plays John, a middle-aged editor who lives like a stalled graduate student in his cluttered Los Angeles cottage. That’s where his former wife and close friend, Jamie (Catherine…
No Festival Required has had many homes over the years, its screenings hosted by so many different venues that its director, Steve Weiss, often refers to it as “the floating crap game of cinema”. Over the past year, one of its reliable haunts has been the Phoenix Art Museum, where Weiss…
Opening with a close-up of the crow’s feet around its subject’s eyes and expanding to reveal her Botox-frozen upper lip, the documentary-portrait Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work celebrates Saint Joan the Resilient, Showbiz Survivor. Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg dogged the indomitable stand-up comic throughout the course of her…
“Everyone thinks they know Joan Rivers. And they do. They know part of her persona and her performances, but they don’t know Joan Rivers.” Filmmaker Ricki Stern is talking about the documentary she co-directed with Annie Sundberg called Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, a frank look at the cracks…
You know and love Jason Bourne as an implacable killing machine. But what if he were a mouthy asshole instead? That’s the provocative question posed by James Mangold’s Knight and Day, which casts Tom Cruise as a Bourne wanna-be who seriously can’t shut up. As Roy Miller, an agent gone…
…intrigue or infuriate you. For the FrICTION film project, director Cullen Hoback has taken a real-life couple and written a script for them. The script? Well, the story has a student come between the couple and, that’s right, cause some friction. The film is composed of scenes shot for…
From Rosemary’s Baby to Children of the Corn, wicked children in cinema have been giving audiences the creeps for decades. Midnite Movie Mamacita and Madcap Theaters director Andrea Beesley-Brown knows how scary demonic, knife-wielding kids can be — she’s seen dozens of films depicting terrifying juveniles. Here are five of…
Fifteen years after ushering in a new era of CGI animation, and 11 years after a colossally successful pre-millennial sequel, the Toy Story franchise returns to a changed world. Its irresistible conceit and snappy good humor remain largely intact, though now it also hauls a saltier and more anxious sensibility…
Condors are the most massive vultures in the Western Hemisphere. To imagine the wing span of Andean and California Condors at their largest, picture 7-foot-one NBA superstar Shaquille O’Neal lying on his side. Now make him about three and a half feet taller. Need a better image? See real Andean…
Besides doing super-fun married stuff like yard work, going to Costco, and leaving the bathroom door open, New Times writers Laura Hahnefeld and Jay Bennett go to the movies.Laura: So you watched the A-Team TV show and saw Karate Kid when you were a kid. Did we make the right choice in…
Last week, we introduced a “Top Five Films” list from Madcap Theaters director Andrea Beasley-Brown, a.k.a. the Midnite Movie Mamacita. While her first list focused on the five most disgusting movies she’s ever seen, this week’s list gives props to babes behind bars. Beasley-Brown admits most movies about women in…
