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…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” So goes the adage from John Ford’s 1962 classic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and so it has gone for Heaven’s Gate, the class-war Western written and directed by one of Ford’s truest disciples among contemporary…
Adam Leon’s Stellar First Film — and TV show — Toasts the Tag Artist
For a movie as much in love with New York’s outer-borough street life as Adam Leon’s Gimme the Loot, it will not do just to talk about the film. That’s what Leon insists, and so I find myself heading north with Leon on FDR Drive on an overcast Friday afternoon,…
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…
“All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun” goes Jean-Luc Godard’s quip. Add to that a few more girls and their bikinis and you have the rough formula for Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, which looks like the most expensive Girls Gone Wild video ever made…
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…
Because there’s no use in waiting for the trial to be over or or giving those involved a minute for closure, Lifetime has confirmed that a movie based on the Jodi Arias circus trial is currently in the works. The reported working title: Dirty Little Secret: The Jodi Arias Story…
Bless the girls and guys of Lena Dunham’s HBO television series Girls. Without them, we’d have far less awkward conversations with our boyfriends, mothers, and coworkers and even fewer reasons to talk about the seemingly ever-present boobs of Dunham, who’s the writer, producer, and star of her own show. There…
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…
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…
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 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…
Unlike many fledgling web series that use broad comedic strokes to up the laughs per second, faux-vlogging gem My Bastard Son combines the naturalistic acting of shows like The Office with absurd circumstances and very specific characters. The grainy, five-minute video shows James Urbaniak (American Splendor) trying to connect with…
Hey, Veronica Mars fans, looks like you’re getting a movie. The teen-noir starring Kristen Bell kicked off in 2004 but was canceled in 2007. Ever since, Bell and creator Rob Thomas promised disappointed fans that they’d try to shoot a movie. Warner Brothers executives (who own rights to the Mars…
Stone-faced and brutal, Lee Marvin defined the role of cinematic “tough guy.” Dwayne Epstein, author of the new biography Lee Marvin: Point Blank, describes the moment he realized Marvin’s role as film’s first “action star” as the “quintessential whack on the back of the head. Some people call it a…
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…
