Even those of us who loved Robin Williams as a performer would have to say that sometimes he was too much — too wired, too pleading, too on. There were times when I’d see him nattering away on a late-night talk show, or suffer through a performance like the one…
Filmmaker Mary Mazzio’s Underwater Dreams is timely, because it deals (perhaps too tangentially) with immigration reform. And the movie, which recently played for a week on various cable networks and now has opened nationwide in commercial theaters, is pleasant to watch for locals because it’s set here in Phoenix, specifically…
In Calvary, Brendan Gleeson plays a Catholic priest who plods through a rustic Irish village that’s more brutal than beautiful. The beach is gray, the waves are choppy, and the wind whips his ankle-length black cassock as though every step were a fight against nature. In some ways, it is…
Necrophilia and gross-out realism abound in James Franco’s Child of God. If director/co-writer James Franco had retitled his adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s 1973 novel Child of God to A Man’s Love for a Corpse, he’d have a more honest film on his hands — not to mention a purposefully campy…
Culinary mash-up The Hundred-Foot Journey is tasty enough. Lasse Hallström has become an expert at making mom-jeans movies, nonthreatening pictures in which headstrong women find love just when they think it’s too late (Once Around), take the upper hand with their cheating husbands (Something to Talk About), and turn small,…
About Alex mines old anxiety with new 30-somethings. Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill had much to say about the angst of losing touch with your younger self and the noble folly of trying to reclaim it. Since its release in 1983, the dramatic tropes of Kasdan’s film — big, nostalgic…
You might’ve noticed some of your old favorites on TV last weekend as you were scrolling through the channels, and the good news is it’s here to stay. Retro TV has officially launched in Phoenix, and that means you can watch shows like classic Doctor Who, Mystery Science Theatre 3000,…
The second-ever Welcome Diner Film Festival will screen locally-made short films on Wednesday, August 13 and Thursday, August 14 at the RoRo eatery. But, before that can happen, the festival needs teams of local filmmakers and actors to work fast and furious under pressure for the 48-hour film challenge. If…
On this week’s film podcast, Stephanie defends her Guardians of the Galaxy review against Internet trolls who tell her to go suck eggs, and we touch on Scarlett Johansson in Lucy and the excellent James Brown biopic Get on Up. There’s a lot to be had in this one. Enjoy…
Some of your favorite comic and cartoon characters might be coming to life this month on the silver screen. Or maybe you’re excited to catch a biographical peek into the world of a prolific fashion designer or genre-bending indie band. In any case, there’s plenty of good stuff to see…
Uncomfortable-silence auteur Joe Swanberg has made a career of testing how much falseness you can strip out and still have a movie. What if people on-screen talked like people off it, and they spent as much time looking at phones and laptops as you do, and if their moments of…
“The heart wants what it wants,” Woody Allen has taught us, and apparently what his heart wants these days is not to have to bother with writing second drafts of film scripts. His latest, Magic in the Moonlight, plays like a sumptuous vacation, its stars larking in ’20s finery about…
Mood Indigo is bitter candy, a heartbreaker that uses sugar as a trap. The director, Michel Gondry, has a brilliant, contradictory brain. He’s a swoony pessimist, a big-dreaming romantic who believes in love at first sight but never lets his films end with a kiss. Instead, his idea of a…
With Jack Nicholson still enjoying his retirement, it falls to Michael Douglas to swoon over the oh-so-cutesy Diane Keaton in And So It Goes, a timid, elder rom-com in the same wheelhouse as the 2003 Nicholson-Keaton team-up, Something’s Gotta Give. A film of nothing but soft edges, director Rob Reiner’s…
He couldn’t have known it at the time, but James Brown’s debut recording and first chart hit — made in 1956 with the Famous Flames — is a question that contains its own answer. The lyrics to “Please, Please, Please” speak, pretty obviously, of sexual desire. But Brown’s voice is…
James Brown stripped pop to its rhythmic essentials: the groove and the grunt, the bridge, and the scream. Tate Taylor’s Get On Up likewise reduces James Brown — and the biopic form — to all that matters most. Here are the highs of the man’s life, both artistic and recreational…
Over the past 18-plus years, Joe Biel has become a DIY archetype. Through hundreds of books and zines with his Microcosm Publishing house, dozens of self-made films, and international “Dinner and Bikes” tours, Biel has invested his entire life in the promotion of underground and alternative culture. For his latest…
On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, Amy Nicholson of the L.A. Weekly and Stephanie Zacharek of The Village Voice interview film critic and author Karina Longworth, who’s just launched a fascinating new podcast on the history of Hollywood called You Must Remember This…
Here is a true story about Bill Thompson, known for decades from Seligman to Scottsdale as Wallace of The Wallace and Ladmo Show: I ran into him in the lobby of the Herberger Theater Center about 10 years ago, and before I had a chance to introduce myself as someone…
“I forget that people think that I’m the girl with a ponytail and a briefcase,” says Anna Kendrick, perched on a couch in a T-shirt and jeans. Her career-launching role as a prim go-getter in Up in the Air is so far removed from her actual self that she’s still…
With his stately drawl, Morgan Freeman has narrated nonfiction documentaries about penguins, slavery, the lemurs of Madagascar, ancient Egyptian pharaohs, and the expansion of the universe. His is a voice of authority tempered by warmth and wisdom, capable of evoking felt human experience and the majesty of creation. In writer-director…
Beware the movie that’s Fun! with a capital F, the one populated with seemingly unpretentious characters that say adorable, clever things, the one that presents each off-kilter joke as if it were a porcelain curio, the one that boasts a comfort-food soundtrack of songs you’ve always liked but perhaps haven’t…
