Most of us can’t imagine having a disease that tugs and tears at the very threads of who we are. When we wake up in the middle of the night with outlandish fears, we strike reassuring bargains with ourselves: If I lose my sight, I’ll still have music. If I…
Each year, screenwriters kill off enough offscreen children to fill a Chuck E. Cheese’s. A dead son or daughter gives a movie the illusion of depth plus an easy explanation for whatever the script ladles on the surviving parents. Binge-drinking? Nymphomania? Sudden bouts of breakdancing? Blame the wee coffin. In…
Some will win. Some will lose. Some will completely forget and be so mad at themselves. Deep breaths, people. Tickets to Jimmy Fallon’s post-Super Bowl XLIX Tonight Show taping at the Orpheum Theatre in Phoenix will be available Wednesday, January 14…
Paul Thomas Anderson was making serious movies long before he started making “serious” movies, ponderous works of certified art like There Will Be Blood and The Master. His earliest pictures, like Hard Eight and Boogie Nights, and even the later Magnolia, were wily, imperfect, vibrating with life like yeast springing…
If you’ve ever loved a terrible person, Mike Leigh’s quietly sensational Mr. Turner — a biopic, of sorts, covering the last 25 years of the life of the great 19th-century British painter J.M.W. Turner — is the movie for you. In his seascapes and landscapes, Turner found the perfect visual…
Without dropping spoilers right and left, how do I explain that I’m completely baffled by the Spierig Brothers’ retro-futuristic thriller Predestination? So the she that’s really a he is the earlier version of the he we meet later on, and the later version of the she who shows up near…
Ava DuVernay’s Urgent Selma Speaks to the Now
Describing Ava DuVernay’s quietly remarkable Selma to a friend, I caught myself referring to the Civil Rights Era as a historical event, a thing of the past, and then backtracked. The killing of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice at the hands of police officers — not to mention…
All you need to know about Taken 3 is that Liam Neeson survives an explosive car crash — twice. Director Olivier Megaton even rewinds the second blast to show us how his hero escaped. It still doesn’t make sense. But who cares. The Taken franchise is rooted in implausibilities, specifically…
Among many other things, Girls has always been great satire, lampooning with scolding empathy the callowness, narcissism, and insufferableness of early-to-mid-20-somethings who are privileged enough to spend their post-grad years making mistake after mistake with no serious consequences. But the HBO dramedy’s fourth season, in which Hannah (Lena Dunham) leaves…
In Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, Navy SEAL Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) — an astoundingly talented marksman credited with over 160 confirmed kills in Iraq — runs into a fellow veteran at a mechanic’s shop between deployments. The soldier shows Kyle an artificial leg and thanks him for saving his life…
The world needs fewer tasteful movies about distasteful things. It definitely doesn’t need J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year, in which Oscar Isaac plays a nouveau-riche heating-oil baron in early-1980s New York, striving to maintain his principles amid industry corruption and generally scummy behavior. Isaac’s Abel Morales skulks through most…
Emerson argued that each flourish and tendril of a work of art has its exact corollary in the mind of the artist, that creative expression is always, in its way, a sort of autobiography: Want to know the person? Look at her works. But Ralph Waldo never lived to see…
Anyone who loves Michael Mann movies, or even just the idea of Michael Mann movies, accepts that film style is a language and something more, a way of thinking, feeling, and looking that goes beyond basic plotting, dialogue, or character motivation. I can tell you pretty much everything that happens…
Set your DVRs, Phoenix. Tempe-based designer Brandon Gore is about to make his national television debut. The creative mind behind Hard Goods and Gore Design Co. is taking his knowledge of quality handmade furniture and applying it as a judge of Spike’s newest reality series, Framework. Gore will host alongside…
If you’re out just about anywhere in metro Phoenix between January 15 and February 15 of 2015, pay attention to your surroundings. You just might find yourself unwittingly engaged with the Art By Chance Ultra Short Film Festival…
Photo by Mark PokornyTalk some sense into ’em, Bilbo.Village Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl and LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson discuss the third-and-final Hobbit movie: The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, in this special bonus episode of the Voice Film Club podcast. As always, send barbs, jabs,…
The waifs Walter Keane made famous were known for their huge peepers. But look down at their mouths: Every one kept its lips pressed tight, as though to prevent a secret from escaping. That’s where you see the real artist: Walter’s shy wife Margaret (Amy Adams),who bitterly allowed her husband…
With the year in moviegoing now a thing of the past — and critics have drawn up their best-of lists — it seems time at last to look ahead. Here are the 10 films to get excited about over the year to come. Jauja: Revered Argentine filmmaker Lisandro Alonso returns…
Harkins Theatres announced on Tuesday, December 23, that it will show Seth Rogen’s The Interview at Tempe’s Valley Art starting on Christmas Day. That announcement follows Sony Pictures’ December 23 statement that the film will be available as a limited release at theaters across the country. The Interview has been…
Village Voice film critic Stephanie Zacharek and LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson run down their ten favorite/best/top/whatever movies of 2014, along with Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl…
The heavens dance. From the bottom of the world, where your eyes might freeze in your face, we see stars pulse against seams of luminous dust, all in slow and dizzying rotation. Then come the lights: Ribbons of green unspool and shimmer and whip across the sky, suggesting angels and…
Call it Stone Age materialism, but I still think movies are worth owning in physical forms you can hold, shelve, and collect, and therefore worth giving as gifts. Fuck the Cloud — who knows when Hulu will get sold to Google or when Netflix decides to narrow down its catalog…
