Willful ignorance as a character trait typically evokes annoyance in those who witness it — at least in real life. In many French films, however, a character who’s willfully ignorant is portrayed in the twee manner, encouraging us to believe it is their blissful view of the world we should…
Why is it that little movies about being out of step so often wind up feeling the same? Not long into Michael Showalter’s Hello, My Name Is Doris, a comedy about a misfit frump pining for a much younger hunk, the unlikely target of the heroine’s affections muses to his…
Drone warfare is a moral grey area, and this movie is on it. Gavin Hood’s Eye in the Sky stands alongside Drones and Good Kill as the cinematic equivalent of online commenters shouting “First!” on on a hot topic but not bothering to say anything new or insightful about it…
The third season of Broad City (Comedy Central) opens with a toilet-centric montage that already feels like one of the year’s TV highlights. At once exuberant, absurd and all-too-real, a split screen reveals besties Ilana (Ilana Glazer) and Abbi (Abbi Jacobson) living their best lives in their respective bathrooms. They…
Be still your beating hearts, ladies. The Internet’s imaginary boyfriends and Making a Murderer’s real life superheroes are coming to Phoenix. In the frenzy that followed the Netflix documentary, viewers were as gripped with defense attorneys Dean Strang and Jerry Buting as they were with the man they were hired to defend. Their bold crusade for Steven Avery went…
Two movies, same scenario: Moments before a scheduled execution, just as the blade or gas pellet is set to deliver its fatal blow, the hero bursts into the room and carries the victim to safety. Banter is exchanged: “What took you so long?” “Traffic was a bitch.” “What took you…
Let’s give Gods of Egypt this much: An hour in, a giant cobra crashes and explodes like a bad guy’s car in a dumb movie from the ’70s. That snake, one of two in Alex Proyas’ film, is wide as a locomotive and long as a parade. It’s also straddled…
What if Terrence Malick directed an episode of Entourage? Well, we’re about to find out, sort of. In Knight of Cups, the director of Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line and The Tree of Life turns his roaming camera and ruminating voiceovers toward Los Angeles and the movie business,…
In Zootopia, animals do a lot of the things that animals in Disney movies usually do: They speak, to begin with; they walk upright and wear funny clothes; they exhibit attitudes that align or ironically misalign with their species’ appearance and reputation; they hold jobs; they experience outsize emotion and…
The title of Glenn Ficarra and John Requa’s strained dark comedy, in which the War in Afghanistan serves as the backdrop to an American woman’s self-actualizing journey, is the military phonetic-alphabet rendering of WTF. The mild Islamophobia and highly questionable casting choices in the film call to mind other texting…
Fans of local talent, Saturday Night Live, and Phoenix’s SAS Fabrics store at long last have a cinematic place to meet: Aidy Bryant’s new short film, Darby Forever. Phoenix native Bryant, now in her third season as an SNL regular, plays Darby, a winsome loser who clerks in a sleepy,…
We’ve all been there. You finally get around to watching this year’s nominees, and you think, “Didn’t I see pretty much this same Oscar-bait movie last year?” You probably did, thanks to the McKee/Weinstein-driven formula behind most Best Picture noms. You can even build your own! Just mix and match…
As the brilliant and bespectacled Liz Lemon once said, “Leap Day is not a thing.” Oh, but it is. February 29 may only come but once every four years, but it’s something worth celebrating. Since real life is for March, and nothing that happens on Leap Day counts (according to…
At first blush, the least Romanian of the Romanian New Wavers, Radu Jude’s new film is in no way a steely-eyed, ultra-realist, uninflected working-class trudge, and the cranial wounds of Eastern European Communism are yet a gleam in the characters’ eyes. Rather, more acutely than The Hateful Eight, Aferim! is…
Bad cop movies — whether bad movies about cops or movies about bad cops — can be like those Arctic core samples from which scientists determine long-gone CO2 levels, though in this case they’re measuring American anxiety about police authority. Pop on John Hillcoat’s agonized pulp thriller Triple 9 in…
In the Winter Olympics, ski jumping is one of those sports — bobsledding and luging are others — where Joe and Jane Satellite Dish cannot tell the difference between a great performance and a terrible one unless the athlete is carried away on a stretcher. No doubt there are crucial…
If you’ve wondered just why Hollywood now so aggressively courts Chinese viewers, look no further than The Mermaid. In just two weeks of release, Stephen Chow’s fantastical comedy has already brought in $430 million in its home country, making it China’s highest-grossing release ever. (It’s doing well here, too, having…
Unless you’ve been living without network television and/or the Internet for the past month, you’re probably fully aware that it’s awards show season. Either you’ve spent hours glued to a screen to see who will be arbitrarily immortalized in front of their industry peers, or you’re painfully annoyed by everyone…
In a September interview with GQ, Constance Wu, star of NBC’s Fresh Off the Boat, observed of the HBO series Togetherness, “It’s a show about white people.” She’s not wrong: Created by indie-film luminaries Jay and Mark Duplass, along with the actor Steve Zissis, Togetherness is a low-key look at…
New Times picks the best arts and culture events in metro Phoenix from February 22 through 26. Workin’ It Out Find yourself with a constant case of the Mondays? Seek reprieve and laugh it off during Workin’ It Out, Ernesto Ortiz and Gene Moore’s weekly stand-up show. As one of the…
The Queens of Quirk from Girls will be back on HBO this Sunday to kick off their fifth season. It doesn’t seem that long ago that we first met Hannah Horvath (Lena Dunham), her best friend Marnie Michaels (Allison Williams), college friend Jessa Johannason (Jemima Kirke), and Jessa’s cousin Shoshanna…
The centerpiece of Hail, Caesar!’s mid-century Hollywood satire is the eponymous film-within-a-film itself, an overwrought biblical epic in which a skeptical Roman centurion played by George Clooney has a literal come-to-Jesus moment. Risen, whose plot can be described in exactly the same way, never inspires one of its own. Co-writer/director…
