The average guy on the street may know who or what Big Star is or was. But the right guy will always know — or be heartened to learn. A grand power-pop outfit formed in 1971 in Memphis by Alex Chilton, former lead singer of the Box Tops, and Chris…
If the great god of movies, whatever slippery Mount Olympus of money he resides on, decrees that summer is the time for larger-than-life 3D blockbusters, Guillermo del Toro may as well make one. His Pacific Rim is summer entertainment with a pulse. The effects are so overscaled and lavish as…
With his anxious parable I’m So Excited!, Pedro Almodóvar imagines a plane malfunction not as a pretext for thrills, as in most films, but as a metaphorical farce: The jet is Spain, and what we should fear for is not just the passengers’ lives, but the country’s. Defective landing gear…
Until 2005 or so, no one thought much about modern piracy of the high-seas variety. But then Somali pirates began attacking merchant ships with increasing frequency, seizing vessels and holding their crews hostage for outlandish sums. Danish director Tobias Lindholm’s wiry, neatly crafted thriller A Hijacking wrests fact into the…
The Way, Way Back is a crowd-pleasing summer treat, predictable in its sweetness but satisfying all the same. It’s like the multinationally branded ice cream sandwich you get on any pier in the Western Hemisphere — market-tested to appeal to as many people as possible (but that you don’t mind…
Nat Faxon and Jim Rash didn’t set out to make a comedy about divorce. Eight years ago, when the improv comedians turned actors turned Oscar-winning screenwriters started writing a coming-of-age script based on a particularly upsetting moment from Rash’s childhood, they just wanted a happy ending. Yet almost all the…
In 1997, the programmers of the Making Scenes queer film and video festival in Ottawa, Ontario, received an unmarked package in the mail. It contained a videotape of an original film and no return address or contact information of any kind. The film, a five-minute short shot on video in…
We love everything about The Newsroom, so don’t even start to try to tell us that it’s unrealistic or that the characters are all too witty. The HBO series, created by Aaron Sorkin (Moneyball, The Social Network, and The West Wing), follows the crew of Atlantic Cable News who are…
There are those who say that Truebies (a.k.a. fans of the HBO series True Blood) only watch the show for its plentiful, raunchy, and often blood-soaked sex scenes. While in plenty of cases that’s not entirely true, no one seems to be complaining about seeing Nordic hottie Alexander Skarsgård, who…
By now, it is well known that hipsters and other assorted smart alecks enjoy watching Die Hard ironically at Christmastime every year. Why should Christmas be the only holiday to get its own ironic films? Here are five movies that you can watch with your friends on the Fourth of…
Before he was one of cinema’s finest dramatists (All About My Mother, Talk to Her, Volver, Broken Embraces), writer-director Pedro Almodóvar was a provocateur and a satirist. The 63-year-old filmmaker harks back to that past with his first comedy in nearly 25 years, I’m So Excited!, a lighthearted, ensemble-driven bit…
Since it opens with a suicide bombing in downtown Tel Aviv, and since its mystery plot involves an attempt to track down a sheik whose public expectorations call for the slaughter of Israeli civilians, The Attack is most avowedly “about” terrorism. But that’s a subject, not the subject. The film,…
“You use big words to say simple things,” says Augustine, an illiterate kitchen maid, to the esteemed doctor treating her for the distinctly female malady “hysteria.” This would be a show of boilerplate feistiness in most films, but in writer-director Alice Winocour’s Augustine, it stands as a subtler, more complex…
We have the Twilight franchise to thank for the fact that almost no sane adult wants to see another vampire movie, ever. Not that all the Twilight movies were bad. The first, directed by Catherine Hardwicke, hit a teen-dream sweet spot, the point where gothic lit meets the iPod. And…
Admit it: Redemption is boring. We think we want characters to “grow” and “change,” but, really, it’s the people around us in real life — people who, say, loudly pick their teeth in restaurants or walk too slowly in public thoroughfares — who need revamping. (We ourselves, of course, need…
The great movie Westerns are about honor, dignity, the majesty of the landscape. But they’re also about beautiful men, charismatic, sometimes dangerous-looking demigods like Robert Ryan, James Stewart, Franco Nero, Randolph Scott, and, of course, John Wayne. The Lone Ranger has Armie Hammer and Johnny Depp, the former a long-legged…
Here Comes Honey Boo Boo is going from obnoxious to odoriferous. Last summer, the infamous TLC reality show chronicling the misadventures of the, um, salt-of-the-earth Thompson clan was all up in everyone’s grill. When the so-bad-it’s-good program returns for its new season later this month, however, it’s gonna be all…
Cool it, Phoenix. There are plenty of ways to chill this summer, and moviegoing happens to be one of the most relaxing and cost-effective — not to mention entertaining. Here are five flicks worth the hot car ride to an icy cold local theater. A Band Called Death As the…
Elijah Wood is a Maniac. By Cory Casciato The original Maniac hit theaters in 1980 and quickly became a slasher classic by heralding a new era in on-screen depravity. The grimy, gritty film about a serial killer who scalps women and collects mannequins famously depicted a close-up of a shotgun…
Experimental-film lovers and indie-flick buffs are sure to get their kooky film fix from Ninja Blend’s Video Blender event at the Phoenix Art Museum. The special one-time Phoenix showing on July’s First Friday will feature shorts from directors Spike Jonze, Jim Jarmusch, and Michel Gondry, along with weird clips, trailers,…
About a week ago, several Facebook friends started linking to Simone Rovellini’s supercut video of exploding Disney princesses. No big whoop, we thought — people dick with animation all the time. Well, Rovellini’s “Exploding Actresses” Tumblr has now been active since June 16, with plenty of classic live-action kapows as…
At the beginning of the 20th century, when the art of filmmaking was in its infancy, audiences were content to look at moving pictures on a screen. Oncoming trains, bumbling cops, and whatever it was that the butler saw were all considered worthwhile entertainment. As the years went on, there…
