Phillip Morris directors fall short of their own high bar with Crazy, Stupid, Love. In the first scene of Crazy, Stupid, Love, Emily (Julianne Moore) tells Cal (Steve Carell), her high school sweetheart and husband of 20-plus years, that she wants a divorce. She goes on to mention that she…
A genially despised genre appealing to a constant and constantly expanding demographic, the high school movie has for years provided ambitious or oddball filmmakers with a measure of cover: It allowed for Gus Van Sant’s fragmented, kinetic Paranoid Park and provided the framework for Antonio Campos’ cyber-thriller, Afterschool. The upcoming…
Sheepishly, obligingly, Azazel Jacobs trespasses into the Manhattan apartment where he used to live. On Avenue A and 10th Street, above where the now-defunct Brownies used to showcase indie bands back when Jacobs was a post-punk post-grad, he pushes open an unlocked door and bounds up the steamy, unrenovated stairwell…
Gunslingers battle space invaders in movie mash-up Cowboys & Aliens. We begin in classic, saddle-sore terrain. A lone stranger with a mysterious past — Daniel Craig fills the boots here — rides into a God-forsaken town in the Arizona territory. More familiar archetypes are waiting for him there: the grizzled…
Unfortunately, the latest season of Entourage premiered last Sunday. Fortunately, it will be the last. Producers say it’s the final season, and though the series has provided many twists and turns (which sports car will they drive today?) viewers will have to watch HBO to see how the story of…
Domestic partners Niki and Esther have a lot in common, and over the course of their three year-plus relationship, they’ve adjusted to their differences. Niki likes quiet nights at home; Esther likes explosions and introduced Niki to sci-fi and comic books. But while Esther loves superhero stuff, Niki can’t get…
Created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby for Marvel Comics in 1941, Captain America was among the first American comic books intended as an explicit work of patriotic, political propaganda: The cover of the debut issue, available months before Pearl Harbor, famously featured the titular costume hero punching out Adolf…
September’s a good month for foreign cinema buffs, who get can get their annual fix at the Scottsdale International Film Festival. The festival has screened more than 280 films from 62 countries, and aims to expose the local audience to a worldwide selection of indie films. This year, the event’s…
Nothing goes better with a movie than dinner (and perhaps vise versa), which Chow Bella has all figured out.Dinner and a Movie pairs all sorts of films with themed recipes each week.Today features Cinema Paradiso, written and directed by Guiseppe Tornatore, which Chow Bella paired with pasta with Campari tomatoes,…
”Voyage Trekkers,” a new sci-fi effort by Phoenix filmmaker Nathan Blackwell, takes on past series like “Star Trek” and “Battlestar Galatica” to show a new side to galaxy crime fighting — namely, the loser-y side.Captain Kirk would be ashamed of this new group of rag-tag outer-space explorers who, in the…
New Times Digital Media Fellows Bryan Dugan and Victor Gonzalez are total film buffs. Okay, not really. Bryan likes glitter and the color purple, and Victor goes to sleep incredibly early and waits for everything to hit HBO. Naturally, we sent them to watch Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows…
After 10 years, seven movies, six Defense Against the Dark Arts teachers, four directors, two dead parents, one grating house elf, and incalculable amounts of CG wizardry, pubescent growing pains, budding romances, and apocalyptic fire and brimstone, we’ve finally arrived: Bespectacled Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) squares off against amphibian-faced Lord…
Not every homo sapiens who sees Project Nim will be moved to pledge membership in PETA. Still, this documentary biopic of the ’70s chimp picked to endure an “experiment” in simian sign language and general neglect pulls human heartstrings as wrenchingly as any creature feature in the 45 years since…
If you have no qualms about eating live roaches, jumping from buildings, or venturing into Scottsdale without a suntan, you’ll want to head to Spanish Fly Mexican Beach Club this Friday night for a chance to compete in the upcoming season of television’s Fear Factor. Spanish Fly reps say the…
Besides doing fun relationship stuff like arguing about how to discipline our dog, New Times blogger Tyler Hughes and his girlfriend, Jackie Cronin, go to the movies. Tyler: I’ve had some pretty bad bosses in my day but I don’t think I would ever actually try and kill any of…
There’s a scene in Horrible Bosses in which Jennifer Aniston, playing a dentist who habitually sexually harasses her weakling male hygienist (Charlie Day), repeatedly says the word “pussy.” Her character is trying to intimidate his, while the filmmakers attempt to shock the audience with the spectacle of this lady rom-com…
Tempe’s MADCAP Theaters announced over the weekend that they’ll be closing for the summer and canceling all film programming until the school year starts back up (or until it cools down). The independent theater on Mill Avenue is currently raising funds to repair its air conditioners, a job they estimate…
n a quietly compelling film about a marathon runner who moonlights as a hold up artist, Benjamin Heisenberg’s The Robber tells the true story of Johann Kastenberger in the days following his release from prison. After seven years of being locked up and running on a treadmill, the Austrian’s ready to integrate back into…
Considering the movie is called Larry Crowne, it sure is tough to get a solid read on the character of Larry Crowne. Directed, co-written by, and starring Tom Hanks in the title role, the film seems to want to be some kind of post-recessional pick-me-up, an “It Gets Better” video…
Nobody cries, “Stop the presses!” in Andrew Rossi’s Page One: Inside the New York Times; no one would dare. There’s a palpable fear that it could actually happen. Rossi’s documentary, which might have been called “Inside Baseball: Inside the New York Times,” opens with a montage of the press in…
A media organization covering the media is reflexive enough, but how about adding documentary filmmakers to the mix? “It was journalists reporting on journalism, and we were working as journalists covering that,” says Kate Novack, producer and writer of Page One: Inside the New York Times, a sprawling vérité group…
The two hours and 34 minutes of Transformers: Dark of the Moon are loaded with unimaginable violence, but only one spasm left the audience at the theater where I watched it speechless. They cheered the robot-on-robot slugfests, rendered in terabyte-straining slow motion and splashing Decepticon blood (oil?). The destruction of…
