Clowning, bullet-riddled rom-com Mr. Right is awfully charming in the best and worse sense of the phrase. It’s often kind of awful but also weirdly, effervescently charming, a movie that salves, with its stars’ radiance and charisma, even as it grates. What hurts: lots of vaguely comic hitman drama, with…
“‘Shaken-baby syndrome’ is in the realm of mythology,” says neurosurgeon Ayub Ommaya in archival footage featured in the documentary The Syndrome. Yet it was Ommaya’s research on monkeys in the 1960s upon which law enforcement and a few medical experts built the shaken-baby syndrome hysteria-industrial complex — a fact he…
Jean-Marc Vallée’s Demolition presents an interesting experiment: What if you told a story of tragedy but withheld all the tenderness and emotion from it, so that you were left — at least until the very end — with just literal and figurative wreckage, disconnected fragments seeking to be put back…
Superhero fans may not know stunt coordinator Philip J Silvera’s name, but they do know his work. Silvera’s choreography turned heads in such recent comic-book adaptations as the Arkham Knight and Arkham Origins Batman video games, the record-breaking Deadpool film and Netflix’s Daredevil. Silvera’s imaginative, brutal work on Daredevil’s first…
Each week, we’re recapping the first season of Fuller House, episode by episode. Time to make some volcanos erupt. Up until this point, our main grievance with Fuller House has been the preemptively desperate cameos of the Elder Tanners. This was most notable in the last episode, when Joey traveled…
I am listening to my Patty Duke records. I have everything she ever recorded for United Artists Records: Seven albums and six singles, all from the mid- and late 1960s, each groove a testament to the fact that this talented actress, who died yesterday at age 69, just plain couldn’t…
Some free advice: If you ever find yourself defensively reminding people that you’re not in a cult, you’re probably in a cult. This comes up early and often in The Path, Hulu’s new series premiering on March 30th, not that any adherents of the fictional Meyerist Movement seem fazed by…
The main attraction in the engaging, largely predictable chess drama The Dark Horse is the gripping lead performance by Cliff Curtis, a part-Maori actor from New Zealand who has spent more than two decades doing notable character parts in big films. You’ll likely recognize his face: His look suggests, at…
Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! is being billed as a “spiritual sequel” to his 1993 high-school stoner classic Dazed and Confused, but in some key ways it feels closer to his animated 2001 philosophy bull session Waking Life — a freewheeling grab bag of ideas, ruminations, and loose ends held…
The musician biopic might be stale and stupid as a genre, but it will endure. Each new one offers the possibility of the wondrous thing that made Hollywood into Hollywood: presence. You can guess from the trailers that I Saw the Light might be a botch job as drama, but…
Each week, we’re re-capping the first season of Fuller House, episode by episode. Grab your She-Wolf Pack and let’s go. Remember when we said that some of the parallels between Fuller House and its parent show were genius? While we still stand by that in regards to the gender reversal…
Garry Shandling has died at the age of 66, according to TMZ. The cause of his death has not been made public at this time. The comedian, writer, and actor, who grew up in Tucson and attended the University of Arizona, wrote for television shows including Welcome Back, Kotter before starring…
Ask weary WWE viewers to identify why the professional-wrestling titan’s creative direction has gone so stagnant and you’ll hear one answer time and again: lack of competition. It’s no coincidence that the company’s late-‘90s heyday ran concurrent with the rise of Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling, which at one point…
Remember when you could only name, like, two reality TV shows? One was Survivor. And the other was MTV’s The Real World. Good news: Real World is still on TV (amid about a zillion other reality programs that have followed in its emotional and kinda trashy footsteps) airing on Thursday nights as…
Thunderous, ponderous and occasionally exciting, Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice opens with one of those grim proclamations that the creators of modern superhero movies are so fond of: “There was a time above, a time before,” intones the voice of Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck), over a by-now…
Have you ever considered the fact that, in 1951, Hank Williams actually wrote “Hey Good Lookin'”? That, for the first 175 years years of American history, those words and that melody weren’t already part of our shared heritage? Williams didn’t just pluck it out of the air, of course. Cole…
The joke was on me when I first saw My Big Fat Greek Wedding back in 2002: I watched the film at a press screening that also happened to be attended by a large group of older female tourists. While I grimaced through the movie’s obvious gags and not-ready-for-prime-time direction,…
The Chet Baker portrayed by Ethan Hawke in Robert Budreau’s misty biopic Born to Be Blue is midway between beauty and ruin. Behind him are the 1950s, when his easy virtuosity and matinee-idol looks swiftly took Baker from Charlie Parker’s sideman to major player on Dick Bock’s Pacific Jazz label…
Prestige cable flatters us about the past. It lets us vacation in the backwardness of previous generations, usually while throwing some empathetic side-eye. Gape at Mad Men’s blithe white dudes, each convinced he earned every bit of authority he commands over women and minorities. Or thank Jezebel that we’ve evolved…
New Times picks the best things to do in metro Phoenix from March 21 through 24. Les Visiteurs Calling all people who shudder at the blasphemy of “freedom fries,” do a reasonable Amelie impression, and can’t help but click on the latest list of how to look as effortlessly stylish as…
Like the Juggernaut or St. Patrick’s Day drunks, nothing can stop the hundreds of hours of filmed superhero junk that hits our faceholes each year. But rest easy, true believer! Once in a while, the onslaught can still offer surprise and pleasure. A shiver of both hit me minutes into…
Take heart, Newsroom fans. If you were hankering for more scenes of Jeff Daniels standing around talking, you’ll find an unlikely ally in the new young-adult sci-fi sequel Allegiant, the third entry in the Divergent series based on Veronica Roth’s hit novels. Too bad the stuff he’s saying is so…
