With unflagging honesty and compassion, Clay Tweel’s documentary Gleason charts the journey of former New Orleans Saints safety Steve Gleason as he copes with the ruinous nerve disease ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. That description, however, can’t quite do justice to Tweel’s film, which is partly built around video journals…
The ludicrous but amusing teen social-media thriller Nerve is committed to pinning its characters into a world we understand as ours. It opens with Skype, Spotify, Gmail, and Chrome, all on the MacBook screen of a mousily beautiful teen, Vee (Emma Roberts), who you just know is one horrific adventure…
Anna Gunn actually gets to do things in Meera Menon’s expansive high-finance drama Equity, which is almost reason enough to recommend it right there. The Breaking Bad co-star tears into the role of a rainmaking banker taking a Silicon Valley company public. For once, it’s Gunn whose character gets to…
Jack Pettibone Riccobono’s The Seventh Fire opens on dark, grainy footage of a highway at dusk before cutting to an overhead shot of a long stretch of forest, and then to two Native American men in a canoe, harvesting worms from a quiet lake. They take the worms home, where…
In Patricia Rozema’s quiet, sci-fi-lite thriller Into the Forest, the power goes out pretty quickly, but the film itself is electric. Nell (Ellen Page) studies for the SAT and chats with her boyfriend on a futuristic floating computer screen, while her sister Eva (Evan Rachel Wood) twists her body into…
Barbara Kopple’s Miss Sharon Jones! tells the kind of true story that makes you want to kick creation itself square in the crotch. Here’s that firecracker soul singer, nearing her 60s, her boogie still majestic, her band still a tight retro marvel, her wail still the southern end of a northbound…
A more appropriate title for Jason Bourne might be Walking: The Motion Picture. This fifth entry in the franchise loosely (very loosely) based on Robert Ludlum’s best-selling novels brings back director Paul Greengrass and star Matt Damon to continue the tale of the good soldier-turned-amnesiac-assassin-turned-rogue agent doing battle against his…
We’re recapping Difficult People, episode by episode. Dear mom who art in heaven, thank you for this free student haircut I’m about to receive. “I’m just an in-between,” Judy Garland once sang, lamenting being stranded between childhood and adulthood, something that permanently dogged her and her career. In Difficult People’s “Italian…
25 years ago, Annie Leibovitz stunned America with her infamous portrait of Demi Moore — nude, bronzed, seven months pregnant — on the cover of Vanity Fair. The image of Moore’s proud, bare body, heavy with child and unmistakably erotic, meant that in some states the magazine had to be…
Like the real 1980s, Stranger Things gets more unsettling as it goes. The opening episode of the Netflix show, created by the Duffer Brothers, gives us swear-y, scruffy kids playing D&D and then, beneath a lavish suburban starscape, encountering the unknown — which one of the boys promptly hides in…
Does it matter that Freddy Krueger was a pedophilic middle-school janitor who died in a blazing fire when parents sought revenge? No. And unless you’re a horror-film obsessive, you probably don’t even know how he morphed into a pizza-faced Where’s Waldo with knife fingers — what matters is he lives…
To understand what Absolutely Fabulous (first a TV show and now a movie) means to Brits, you’d have to go back to the TV premiere in 1992. Margaret Thatcher had their economy in a stranglehold until her departure as Prime Minister two years earlier, and when every sensible citizen was…
Catherine Corsini’s lovely, sultry Summertime, a 1971-set tale about two women of different ages and class backgrounds who fall in love, celebrates erotic abandon but never loses its mind. Unlike Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013), France’s most notorious treatment of a sapphic sentimental education, Corsini’s movie, which…
Star Trek Beyond might be the Star Trekkiest film of the new, J.J. Abrams-ified Trek era. That is to say, it’s the one that feels the most like a turbo-loaded episode of the original series, and has at least some of that classic spirit of exploration and derring-do. That’s not…
We’re recapping Difficult People, episode by episode. The answer to that word jumble is Ingrid BERGMAN. Difficult People debuted its second season on Hulu this week with not one but two episodes. So hi, adoring public, here’s your second Diff-P recap of the week. This time around, Billy and Julie face…
Summer escapes to the multiplex are a time-honored tradition in the Valley, but you can add a little more charm this year by actually getting out of town to the Prescott Film Festival starting on Sunday, July 17. Now in its seventh year, the week-long festival runs until Sunday, July…
Each week, we’re recapping the second season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt episode by episode. “Kimmy Finds Her Mom!” marks the end of the second season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and it has a high standard to meet, as the final episodes of season one depicting the Reverend’s trial remain probably the…
Underneath the flurry of sequined panda bear masks, butterfly wings, actual monkey suits, and lamé capes of Mexico’s beloved wrestlers, there are lives at stake, portrayed with varying degrees of success in Lucha Mexico. The documentary opens at FilmBar on Friday, July 15, playing only twice, and also at Sonora Cinemas,…
A while back I cracked a dumb joke about all our presidential candidates being corrupt. My wife hit back with this: “You’re a JibJab!” She referred, of course, to the animated viral sensations of America circa 2005 or 2008, the once wildly popular political-parody videos that, in the interest of…
In the world of Difficult People, the cutting comedy returning this week to Hulu, the game is rigged against Julie (Julie Klausner) and Billy (Billy Eichner), but perhaps only because they rigged it against themselves. As their friends find success, the two struggling comedians feign interest in jobs that pay…
We’re recapping Difficult People, episode by episode. Come sit with us as we atrophy and wither. “So this is what a gym looks like,” Julie says, scooping her way through a sundae while walking by a rock-climbing wall. So we begin season two of Difficult People in a place designed for…
Here’s a story you might have missed a few weeks back, what with the country collapsing. In late June, at Dallas’ Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center, 30 aspirational souls received burn treatment after walking over hot coals at a Tony Robbins seminar. Robbins, a seize-your-life salesman of granite physique and…
