When commercials for Mel Brooks’ Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995) ran on Channel One at my high school, I was ready. Vampire movies had dominated the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, and at last a slapstick comedy was set to lampoon all that arty melodrama. High school me couldn’t…
After spending 13 episodes catching up on life with them, we’ll miss our old familiar friends DJ, Kimmy, Stephanie and the rest of the Fuller House gang. This finale hardly felt like one, probably because we knew that there will be a second season of the show before we even…
When Joe Fortunato was 7 years old, he refused to get into the bathtub. Or go swimming in his cousin’s pool. Or join the family’s annual summer beach trip. “My mom took me to see Jaws,” Fortunato says, before adding with a laugh, “We can question my mother’s parenting skills.”…
In 2001 a friend, a grown-up, saw The Fellowship of the Ring more than a dozen time in the theater. Sometimes she’d leave with a half hour left. “I just needed to get to Galadriel and Lothlorien,” she told me. She didn’t need all the climactic fighting. In 2012 I…
Back in 2013, James Wan’s The Conjuring represented the high point of a wave of mainstream horror that showed there was still value in old-school scares — that there was life beyond torture porn and slick slasher reboots. It was a ghost story-turned-possession thriller that mined terror out of the…
There’s something satisfying about hearing Tyler Perry, as mad scientist Baxter Stockman, say the words “Eliminate those turtles,” but it’s not quite novel enough to bring Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows up to street level and out of the sewers. Early on, giant squid-like brain Krang (Brad…
Each week, we’re recapping the second season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt episode by episode. After a few rocky ones, we finally get an episode of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt that works on every level. The character development, the humor, the pacing, the relevance to the larger themes of the show — each…
If mid-century pulp and noir gave us the cynical, quippy hardboiled detective, then Peak TV has given birth to its successor: the charbroiled cop, a bitter, corrupt, philandering, violent, addicted, nihilistic or just psychotic contemporary crime fighter. The supposed irony of this figure is that he (almost always a he)…
It’s a feat to out-idiot TMZ culture. In achieving that, the fake-doc white-rapper satire Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is a breakthrough for studio comedies, which here at last catch up to the metabolism and meaninglessness of the internet age. In its generous, frenetic first hour, Popstar’s jokes and parodies…
“Did I want to shoot comedies?” asks Brandon Trost, director of photography on two of this summer’s funniest films, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping and Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising. “It’s funny — not at all.” But then came MacGruber, Jorma Taccone’s 2010 SNL film.“The director wanted me because I wasn’t…
With the perfect timing of a deadpan comic and the keen observational skills of a zoologist, Athina Rachel Tsangari highlights just how bizarre the most banal of human activities can be. In Attenberg (2010), the filmmaker’s previous feature, walking itself is presented as a deranged means by which to move…
At first glance, the most obvious analog to Mark Elijah Rosenberg’s Approaching the Unknown would be The Martian, both being about lone men on treacherous missions to Mars. But Approaching the Unknown operates on a much smaller and more philosophical scale, and is ultimately more satisfying. Captain William D. Stanaforth…
Mockumentary Hitler’s Folly, at only an hour long, stretches its incredibly thin premise over a surface area the size of the European front. Its single, exhausting joke: Hitler, a misunderstood artist, actually built a Disney-style animation empire that was mistaken for a fascist regime. Bill Plympton is a singularly gifted artist…
Each week, we will be recapping the first season of Fuller House, episode by episode. Please, we beg you, no more musical numbers. As we near the end of season one, our spirits were buoyed seeing our main ladies make some significant strides in their professional lives during the previous…
New Times picks the best things to do in metro Phoenix from Friday, May 27, through Sunday, May 29. For more options, see our online curated calendar of events. 9 Muses Think back to the Homeric epics studied (or Sparknote-d) in high school and you may remember that history’s longest-winded writer…
I’m not actually that perky.
Each week, we’re recapping the second season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt episode by episode. Read it before it’s cool. Last week, we talked about how the juggling of multiple plotlines can cause inconsistency within an episode. Meanwhile, “Kimmy Drives A Car!” demonstrates how a variable production crew can cause inconsistency…
Predicting the future is a murky, and often pessimistic, business, but the movies have been doing it with varying degrees of success almost since their inception. FilmBar is holding a summer-long series in conjunction with Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination that looks back at cinematic interpretations…
In 2013, a 22-year-old Palestinian named Mohammed Assaf won the second edition of the Middle Eastern singing competition Arab Idol, a spinoff of the same popular British Pop Idol franchise that also gave us American Idol. Mohammed had snuck out of Gaza and crashed the auditions in Egypt before making…
There’s reason for skepticism when you hear that a new documentary plays like a thriller. That suggests that the filmmakers have favored suspense over documenting — that the specifics of real life will be arranged according to the logic of plotting rather than reportage. Will Allen’s sunny gut-punch cult exposé, Holy…
On June 24, Disney Channel will première the release of its 100th original movie, a remake of the 1987 film Adventures in Babysitting. It joins the ranks of some seriously iconic films that feature family fun and life lessons. To celebrate, Disney’s dedicating this Memorial Day Weekend to broadcasting an impressive…
Postpartum OCD is a real-life condition worthy of horror films. New moms fight off intrusive thoughts about someone killing or stealing their baby — or killing their baby themselves — and it’s surprisingly common. Since some of the best genre films play off of our ingrained paranoia, writer-director David Farr…
