Science fiction has gotten so high and mighty on TV that it now can be easy to admire but hard to love. Westworld and Mr. Robot may win Emmys and prompt think-pieces, but their self-reflective chill keeps the audience at arm’s length — few things are as annoying as getting…
Let’s say you had to make up a list of historical moments that might serve as grand backdrops for sweeping, old-fashioned, Hollywood-style romantic dramas. How high would you rank the Armenian Genocide? How high would you rank any genocide? Watching Hotel Rwanda, you probably never hoped that, amid the carnage,…
S is for . . . Steve and DJ 4EVA.
For a movie in which a major character’s death is discovered when a giant lizard-monster vomits out his skull, Kong: Skull Island is a surprisingly breezy affair. It’s not so much that the characters or situations are particularly lighthearted. The film offers up plenty of wartime atmosphere and grim backstory,…
It’s March! Time to celebrate spring by staying inside and watching more TV! National Treasure (Hulu), March 1Originally a UK Channel 4 miniseries, this is a four-hour deep-dive into rape and sexual assault allegations against a beloved celebrity comedian. Sound familiar? I have some apprehension that it’ll try too hard…
Movie actors intend no less than to live forever, a goal that seems likely for the ever-likable, endlessly surprising Bill Paxton, who died last weekend at age 61 from complications following heart surgery. (Too damn soon.) No softie, Paxton created memorable movie villains, including the loves-his-work vampire in Near Dark…
How could this not work? Table 19 boasts the right premise and a top-shelf cast: Anna Kendrick, Stephen Merchant, June Squibb, Craig Robinson and the great Lisa Kudrow as the randos consigned to a wedding reception’s least choice table, the one way in the back by the bathrooms. Mostly strangers…
There’s a reason Zoey Deutch is often “the girl” in comedies. Her face expresses multitudes, and the funny guys need a woman with priceless reactions to sell their punch lines. She’s endured dick jokes for Robert De Niro and Zac Efron in Dirty Grandpa, played oblivious straight woman to the…
A stylized painting of Woody Allen, a golden gun to his forehead, stares down at Hannah Horvath (Lena Dunham) in the astonishing third episode of Girls’ final season. She’s seated in the study of a best-selling wunderkind novelist, planted in the middle of his sofa while he faces her, coldly,…
If you’ve grown weary of the Don Drapers and Walter Whites of the world, don’t expect James Keziah Delaney to make a strong first impression. Taboo’s antihero, played with signature laconicism by Tom Hardy, is another difficult man for this golden age of TV — and, as fate would have…
“A cat meowing at your feet, looking up at you, is life smiling at you,” says one of the interviewees in Kedi, and who am I to argue? Ceyda Torun’s daydream-like documentary explores a subject near and dear to my heart: the street cats of Istanbul, those countless, fearless denizens…
Logan is a punch in the gut in all the right ways. Onscreen, the X-Men series has always found ways to morph and expand, from time-traveling fantasy to social allegory to political thriller. And it’s done so as other comic-book franchises have ossified, with the DC movies (foolishly) doubling down…
Degrassi students should watch and learn from their own show.
Scottsdale native began acting in youth theater productions in Phoenix, left high school to pursue her Hollywood dream.
The one thing I know for sure is that most Oscar voters don’t care that a film as seemingly pleasant as Damien Chazelle’s modern musical La La Land has proven so divisive. Even as lyrics from “City of Stars” have become inspirational memes, artists like songwriter Elon Rutberg are calling…
Don’t bet against La La Land and Arizona’s Emma Stone; follow our live tweets on Twitter @phoenixnewtimes
Is a 21st reunion a thing?
Television’s smartest network drama went out last year with a slap. The Good Wife, the hour-long CBS procedural about savvy lawyers and sexy investigators, looked as if it was going to end where it began, with Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) standing by her politician husband Peter (Chris Noth) at a…
Jordan Peele’s Get Out is the most trenchant studio release in years, a slow-building, often hilarious horror thriller built upon a dead-serious idea: that a black man walking alone through white suburbs is in as much danger as any slasher-flick teenager. Peele opens with that image, showing us, in a…
It was interesting, and more than a little inspiring, to watch the public outcry against the nomination of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education over the past couple of weeks — especially the online campaign in which, in response to DeVos’ ill-informed attacks on America’s supposedly failing public education system,…
Maybe this’ll teach us not to judge a movie by its marketing campaign. Thanks to posters and trailers focused solely on its American star, Matt Damon, Zhang Yimou’s The Great Wall has been pilloried as an example of a Chinese myth being given the Hollywood white-savior treatment. In fact, the…
Director George Mendeluk has stated that he wanted to make Bitter Harvest to bring wider attention to the Holodomor, the forced famine imposed by Joseph Stalin that killed between three and seven million ethnic Ukrainians in the early 1930s. That’s certainly a subject worthy of a film, but the question…
