But what about the meaninglessness of everything? William Monahan’s Mojave is one of those ’90s-style chatty-killer movies, mixed with one of those ’90s-style guns-in-the-desert existential cheapies, the kind of picture where good-looking dudes shooting each other is passed off as elemental and beautiful rather than just what it actually is…
Critics rarely receive love from filmmakers. Last year’s Best Picture Oscar winner, Birdman, featured a vengeful harpy of a theater reviewer (played by Lindsay Duncan) hellbent on annihilating a play before she’d even seen it. Birdman was joined in its release year by other unfair portraits of critics in Top…
Alan Rickman has died at the age of 69. To Americans of a certain generation, he’ll always be Hans Gruber from Die Hard; to those of a slightly fresher vintage, he’ll never not be Severus Snape. But it was his ability to transcend the typecasting of those iconic roles that…
Benghazi is a hashtag battle-cry, a call to arms that many Americans don’t understand. Unlike the simplicity of “Remember the Alamo!” a bleat of “Benghazi!” still has people wondering, “Wait, what happened? And why are we mad?” Michael Bay’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi has an explanation, though…
The world is reeling from the sad news that British actor and director Alan Rickman has died at the age of 69. His fans and co-stars have taken to social media to share their grief and to reminisce about their favorite roles in his career. Whereas some performers find a…
Actual angel from heaven and French Bulldog-Chihuahua mix Roxy is 15 weeks old, weighs in at a mere 6 pounds, and will be the first-ever Arizona shelter dog to represent her home state in Animal Planet’s annual Puppy Bowl. Yes, we agree that she is literally the cutest. And, no,…
What are the limits of representation? That’s a moral question that hovers over any depiction of the Final Solution, and it’s not considered lightly by László Nemes’ Son of Saul, which turns unimaginable horrors into tangible ones. By venturing inside the death factory of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Nemes risks greeting obscenity with…
A sure-bet time-waster with a clutch of big laughs? A 100-minute brief on Hollywood’s lack of imagination? Grist for future essays about how quickly the idea of Ice “Fuck tha Police” Cube playing a gun-happy hero cop became routine? Whatever you make of Ride Along 2 beforehand is certain to…
On Friday, January 15, Degrassi: The Next Class will première on Netflix under their easy-to-binge model, with all 10 new episodes arriving at the same time. The news of the previous iteration’s cancellation on it’s long-time network, Teen Nick, created an outcry not only from it’s fans who had followed the…
After news broke on Monday, January 11, that musician, artist, and fashion icon David Bowie had died the night before, Phoenicians were quick to commemorate the life and work of the late creative force. Valley Bar promised an evening of spinning nothing but Bowie’s records on Monday. And this weekend,…
Few shows capture life in your 20s quite as well as HBO’s Girls. Lena Dunham’s project covers everything from employment and financial struggles to friendships and relationships. Of course, sex — realistic sex, at that — has always been one of the show’s major topics (both because it’s appropriate and…
The seventh episode of Transparent’s second season, now available on Amazon, takes place on Yom Kippur. The holiest day of the year in the Hebrew calendar, it’s a holiday on which Jews fast to symbolically atone for their sins. It’s also a significant occasion for Transparent, which, like the Pfefferman…
It’s hard to imagine a more unsettling setting for a horror movie than Aokigahara, the famed “suicide forest” of Japan to which scores of pilgrims travel every year to end their lives. At the edge of the woods — which, per Japanese mythology, are rife with demons — is a…
The 16th annual Phoenix Film Festival has been announced for this spring, leaving you just enough hours to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens roughly 960 more times. While the festival’s lineup has yet to be released (and won’t likely feature anything from J.J. Abrams), the festival itself will return to…
Charlie Kaufman is a cartographer of the soul. You can picture him hunched over parchment accurately inking each dark river and, off to the side, cautioning that there be dragons. What makes Kaufman cinema’s best psychoanalyst is a contradiction. He sees people for who we are — hurtful, hopeful, lovely,…
What’s been missing for years in Hollywood’s adventure films? Verisimilitude. Correspondent with the rise of the computers, and the ability to show us any place that filmmakers can imagine, has been the fall of immersiveness — that sense that the actors are in a place you can’t go yourself rather…
Breathes there a nerd born between, say, 1955 and 1990 that has never held an Alan Dean Foster book in his or her hands? It might just be a qualifying requirement for fully enfranchised American nerd-dom of that generation. Born in 1946, Foster, a Prescott resident for decades, has been…
As cinematic year 2015 reaches its end, the FOMO specter threatens to haunt us all. If you pored over the results of our film poll and felt aghast at how many apparently great movies you’ve yet to see, here at last is a chance to catch up without braving traffic. —Michael…
San Tan Valley residents Barby Ingle and Ken Taylor might sound more than a little crazy when you learn what they’ll do to save a little time. They will do dishes in the shower, shave in the pool, and go to other measures to save precious seconds. And you can…
If one of your resolutions is to see more movies this year, we applaud your priorities and look forward to helping you achieve that goal — starting right now. There are several local screenings to check out in January 2016, as well as a couple of big releases to see,…
This time of year, everyone is looking to re-invent themselves. Whether 2015 was a rough year for you, or even if it wasn’t all that bad, we all look to the new year for a chance to be better than we were before. If you need a little inspiration, look…
In most of his eight films and especially since The Fighter (2010), choreographer of chaos and screwball scion David O. Russell has assembled boisterous, buoyant casts. His manic ensemble players, like those in Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, carom off one another, their high-pitched energy keeping the movies bustling…
