Don’t hold it against Tom Tykwer’s A Hologram for the King that its best scene is also its first. As Alan Clay (Tom Hanks) strides down a suburban street singing a modified version of Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” (“You may find yourself … without a beautiful house ……
Elvis Presley once watched Dr. Strangelove three times in one night at a Memphis movie theater. After that, he made them play the last reel several more times, marveling at it. It’s fascinating to wonder about: Here’s this country’s biggest musical star, the leading man in movies he knew were…
Jonathan Pine, the hero of The Night Manager, might have a syrupy voice and skin tanned to a glowing bronze, but in other respects he’s a classic John le Carré creation. Pine (Tom Hiddleston) makes his living unshowily and in the dark, at a swank hotel, juggling front-desk phone calls,…
Who says superheroes can’t get action beyond fight scenes? Just because they’re saving the world all the time doesn’t mean they can’t serve justice between the sheets, too. With superhero movies and TV shows more popular than ever, we’re looking back at some of the steamiest moments in superhero sex…
Careful what you wish for. When it was announced that Jessica Chastain and Emily Blunt would be joining Charlize Theron and Chris Hemsworth for the followup to 2012’s humdrum action/fairy tale Snow White and the Huntsman, many filmgoers, myself included, got unduly excited. The original film, while a hit, had…
All actors possess their own personal gateway into becoming a character. Some require deep memory mining (Method). Others require lengthy conversations with the director about seemingly unrelated philosophical topics. And some just need a single physical characteristic around which they can develop a character’s entire being. Susan Sarandon is a…
Deep into her earnest, uncertain Nina Simone drama Nina, writer-director Cynthia Mort at last musters up a sequence of gravity and power. The inimitable Miss Simone — imitated here by Zoe Saldana — reads a letter from a woman who has recently lost her mother, a great Simone fan. It’s…
Each week, we’re recapping the first season of Fuller House episode by episode. Everyone jump in the ring! The Legend of El Explosivo opens with Kimmy unloading a bag of groceries from her trip to the 89-cent store. She gushes about it — compared to the snooty 99 cents store…
High-Rise weaves a remarkable web of contradictions. Locally debuting at Phoenix Film Festival this past weekend, the film tells a grand, sweeping story within the confines of a single apartment building over a three-month period. It’s a flashy, graphically violent, high-intensity thriller, as well as a metaphorical thinkpiece on the nature…
Vaxxed, the new “documentary” about the alleged connection between vaccines and autism, is directed by Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced doctor responsible for duping untold thousands of parents into believing vaccinations could give their children autism. This may not be news to anyone who’s followed the controversy surrounding the film’s abrupt…
You may know John Carney as the writer and director of Once and Begin Again, both indie romantic comedies with fantastic soundtracks about struggling musicians in major cities. His new film Sing Street, which debuted locally this past Sunday at the Phoenix Film Festival, makes the three a sort of spiritual trilogy. The film sets…
The effortless charisma of Ice Cube and Cedric the Entertainer, the headliners of the first two Barbershop movies (released in 2002 and 2004), helped keep those over-plotted comedies buoyant. Cube and Cedric are back as Calvin and Eddie in Barbershop: The Next Cut, but even their enormous appeal can’t rescue…
Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room is an impeccably crafted cinematic torture machine — in the best possible way. The premise will make some cringe, while making others giddy: A punk band, trapped in a club in the middle of nowhere, have to fight off a bunch of murderous skinheads to get…
Score one for going home again. After misfiring with Begin Again, a film that asked us to worry over a disillusioned A&R man’s efforts to coax a folk-pop album out of Keira Knightley, writer-director John Carney has turned back to the striving Irish of Once, his breakout hit. He’s also…
In Where We Stand: Class Matters, bell hooks argues that people with wealth sometimes have a difficult time understanding the fact that they’re wealthy because they know there are others who have more than they do. When watching Amanda Marsalis’ feature film debut, Echo Park, it’s difficult not to think…
What do you get when you make a superhero movie with a male lead but keep your female audience at the forefront in your decision-making? Apparently a box office hit. By now, you’ve probably heard about the wild success of the little superhero film that could: Deadpool. Nobody expected much…
Hardcore Henry screened as a midnight movie at last September’s Toronto Film Festival, and was so ecstatically received that a distributor bidding war ensued. Six months later, the film has hit theaters nationwide and fallen flat, thanks to intensely negative reviews from critics upset by its unceasing violence. It didn’t…
Colonia is not a “thriller,” so let’s get that out of the way. It’s a love story that also happens to be set in one of the most viscerally horrifying cult prisons in history. (The story is “based on true events.”) If that premise sounds jarring to you, you’re not…
Stately, earthy, graphic, riveting: Gabriel Mascaro’s Neon Bull is one of those art-house studies that plops the camera down someplace far from us and, in exquisite long takes, examines the lives that almost seem to just be happening there anyway. No matter how rigorously worked out each shot and its…
Here’s about as convincing an argument as I can imagine for the existence of the modern Hollywood blockbuster. Disney and Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book reinvigorates an oft-told tale with star power, technology and calculated charm. It’s been billed as a live-action remake (it’s too good to be called a…
To create his film Rwanda and Juliet, Canadian filmmaker Ben Proudfoot traveled to Kigali with a movie crew and a plan. There, they followed Andrew Garrod, a former Dartmouth College professor and the co-founder of a decades-old group called Youth Bridge Global that mounts Shakespeare productions in hopes of inspiring…
Here’s a question faced by the creators of almost every superhero adaptation: How do do you pull this off without copying Frank Miller’s Batman? Too many modern superhero dramas — including the Dark Knight films, Arrow, Daredevil and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice — either ape the dour realism…
