10 Films We Can’t Wait to See at the Phoenix Film Festival

The Phoenix Film Festival screens more than 150 feature films, documentaries, and shorts, and sadly, there’s simply no way our eyeballs can be in so many places at once. In an attempt to help you navigate and whittle down your choices from the masses, here’s a list of our Top…

Tina Fey’s Great, but Admission Doesn’t Have the Marks

An actress in her 30s — a woman, that is, still playing characters of babymaking age — may have it even tougher than actresses in their 40s and 50s. Unless she is exceedingly glamorous, à la Charlize Theron, she can all too easily get stranded in the land of mom…

In No, It’s the Ad Men Versus the Dictator

In 1988, the fate of Chile and its dictator came down to a ballot as simple as a middle-schooler’s do-you-like-me? note. A referendum offered citizens a simple choice: a “yes” for allowing President Augusto Pinochet to return to office for another eight years, having clung to power since his 1973…

On the Road Is Tamed at Last

Two sacred texts of the ’50s proto-counterculture have escaped the rapacious machine of cinema adaptation for a half-century. One is J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, which probably only would have worked starring Salinger himself, and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, that ecstatic recount of crossings and recrossings of North…

Philip Roth Unmasked Reveals Our Most Wicked Writer as a Charmer

Here’s a tale that explains everything: A young Philip Roth, trying to shove his teen brain through Ulysses, is struck by a passage about Leopold Bloom’s public masturbation. Watching a girl watching fireworks, Bloom manipulates himself through a hole cut in his trouser pocket, the act gilded with Joycean rhapsodies…

Here are Five Awesome/Crazy Theories About The Shining from Room 237

Like the blood that gushes forth from the elevators of the Overlook Hotel, brilliant/ridiculous theories of what Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is really about have for years surged madly and memorably — especially online, where the internet’s dead-ends, blind links, and back-where-you-started arguments just might be another part of the…

8 Great Shows You Haven’t Binged-Watch on Netflix Yet

Luther (Netflix Link) Golden Globe winner and impossible-handsomeness standard-bearer Idris Elba is Detective Chief Inspector John Luther, a brilliant investigator with a complete inability to detach from the darkness of his work. In the pilot, he investigates chilling psychopath Alice Morgan, played by Ruth Wilson — he knows, but cannot…

Harmony Korine Explains the “Beauty in Horror” of Spring Break

To most of the world, spring break seems like a lot of fun, but people who live in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, or South Padre Island understand the dark side. Damn college kids pass through for a week to drink liquor, trash the streets, and wear T-shirts announcing, “I survived spring…

A Survival Guide to Phoenix Film Festival 2013

Attention, film buffs: It’s that time of year when Phoenix gets to showcase aspiring filmmakers and everyday Phoenicians can pretend to be a part of the glitterati, rubbing elbows with celebrities, producers, and directors. The 13th Annual Phoenix Film Festival will screen more than 150 feature films, documentaries, and shorts…

In Top of the Lake, Peggy Olson Goes to Hell

Elisabeth Moss’s face is far from the only reason to savor Top of the Lake, Jane Campion’s smart, bracing, hugely enjoyable mystery rural noir Top of the Lake, which premieres on the Sundance Channel on Monday, March 18. But that pale-to-radiant instrument of hers—a mouth that suggests her characters might…

Burt Wonderstone Vanishes What Steve Carell’s Best At

Steve Carell’s gift is for men who might drown in their own obliviousness. Like his Daily Show reporter or The Office’s Michael Scott, his 40-year-old virgin lived in terror that someone might catch on to the fact that he knows nothing about subjects he purports to have mastered. When his…

In Stoker, Girlhood Blooms Into Violence

Puberty is sex and sex is murder in Stoker, a Hitchcockian stew of hothouse familial jealousy, sadism, and psychosis all tied together by one teenage girl’s homicidal coming of age. Psychosexual imagery permeates every inch of renowned South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook’s stateside debut. A blood-tipped pencil and water dripping…

Like Someone in Love: Iranian Master Kiarostami’s Audacious Romance

Like the yearning Jimmy Van Huesen/Johnny Burke torch song that lends it its title, Abbas Kiarostami’s Like Someone in Love is a sly, teasing riff on the heart’s irrational stirrings. But the film’s true spirit is even better encapsulated by Training a Parrot, an early 20th-century painting by the Japanese…

Five Must-See Movies in Phoenix This March

Load up on your snack of choice, pal. You have some movies to see. Here are five flicks and festivals you don’t want to miss this month. The Monk at Harkins Shea In our pope-free world, searching for piousness seems pretty pointless. But slacking on our Hail Marys doesn’t really…