There’s much to sadly shake your head at in Pan, a sort of Peter Pan Begins that manages the unlikely feat of making battles between flying pirate ships a crushing bore. Most miserably, there’s the great heap of action set pieces that are easier to wait out than to track…
Right up into the 1960s, the Hays Code demanded that criminals in American movies face punishment by the final reel, a stricture that, however well-intentioned, served to propagate our national myth: that the only route to success is hard work and decency. Crime still doesn’t pay, exactly, onscreen. The code…
Those of us who have been waiting forever for Joseph Gordon-Levitt to make a musical now have the next best thing: In Robert Zemeckis’ The Walk, this breezy Puck of an actor plays high-wire artist Philippe Petit, who walked the space between the World Trade Center’s twin towers in 1974…
Sophia Amoruso If BossyPants made you want to Lean In, maybe you should add #GIRLBOSS to your nightstand. And if you have no idea what we’re talking about, maybe you should spend more time at Changing Hands Bookstore, 300 West Camelback Road. That’s where Sophia Amoruso will be signing her…
Summer officially starts to end with the dawn of film festival season, when we critics pack our suitcases and trek to the Toronto International Film Festival to see what great, smart, small movies are going to make a run at the art house, or even the Oscars. The 10 best…
Since 1963, the Austrian birthrate has halved. You can’t blame Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s new thriller, Goodnight Mommy, for the trend, but it sure isn’t helping. The quiet creepshow follows 11-year-old twins Lukas and Elias (Lukas and Elias Schwarz, great), who suspect their mom (Susanne Wuest) wishes they hadn’t…
Desperation, anxiety, stubbornly saying yes to survival: If grand struggles are your thing, there are plenty in Ridley Scott’s The Martian, based on Andy Weir’s popular novel, which was first self-published in 2011 and then picked up by Crown in 2014 — itself a rare seedling that took root against…
With a spooky holiday at the end of the month, we had to throw in a new slasher flick and a classic horror movie on this list of the best films to see this October. The rest of your movie nights can be spent checking out a space adventure, a…
The minds of math and science geniuses have long fascinated the makers of crowd-pleasing narrative features, which is curious, as the complexities that fascinate those minds are antithetical to the feelings-first bounce of popular filmmaking. The movies, having settled into candied naturalism, already struggle to suggest interiority, even of characters…
The hardest type of guy for an actor to play is one without charisma. That’s the challenge faced by Tobey Maguire in Edward Zwick’s Pawn Sacrifice, which tells the story of Cold War-era chess champ and totally strange human being Bobby Fischer. He’s good at it — maybe too good…
The American Dream killed Jay Gatsby and Willy Loman, but their TV counterparts have mostly fared better. Sure, Walter White ends up in a metaphorical ditch and Tony Soprano may too. But the serialization of TV storytelling largely means that characters on shows like Roseanne, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,…
With found footage having long ago supplanted torture porn as the horror subgenre du jour, the prospect of a new Eli Roth movie might seem even more dubious than it was during the director’s heyday. The Green Inferno arrives in theaters two years after making the festival rounds and a…
Some veteran filmmakers try to capture the younger generation and fail to get it right, coming up with characters and faux with-it dialogue that invite lots of “Oh, Mom!” eye-rolling. That’s not the problem with writer-director Nancy Meyers’ The Intern, in which retiree Robert De Niro finds meaning in life…
The good news about the Richard Gere drama about the bad news of New York’s enduring homeless crisis? Time Out of Mind, written and directed by Oren Moverman, is stubbornly, respectfully unflashy, Manhattan neorealism steeped more in reportage than in the clichés of prestige films. A prideful man slow to…
First things first: This is not the list of movies you’d see on a syllabus for any classic films class. Some of these might appear there, but this list wasn’t made to teach you which films released before 1975 were the best made. Instead, we’ve compiled a list of truly…
Phoenix native Mikaela Shwer’s Don’t Tell Anyone (No Le Digas a Nadie) premières on the PBS series POV on Monday, September 21. The documentary tells the story of Angy Rivera, whom Shwer met in New York when Rivera was undocumented. Rivera grew up in New York City after her fleeing Colombia…
Space 55 Theatre announced on Thursday, September 17, that Duane Daniels is its newly appointed artistic director. Daniels steps into the role previously held by Shawna Franks,who founded the independent downtown Phoenix theater space in 2006. Franks has moved to Chicago, where she’s recently worked with Steppenwolf Theatre Company. “I…
Charlie Kaufman is a cartographer of the soul. You can picture him hunched over parchment accurately inking each dark river and, off to the side, cautioning that there be dragons. What makes Kaufman cinema’s best psychoanalyst is a contradiction. He sees people for who we are — hurtful, hopeful, lovely,…
“I’ve turned into this kind of crazy optimist,” Michael Moore admits in his new documentary Where to Invade Next, his first film in six years. At 61, the gadfly savant has mellowed. Instead of charging into rooms, he shuffles, the American flag wrapped around his shoulders like a grandmother’s shawl. Conservatives…
Still in Hiding Black Mass is strong, 0x000Abut Johnny Depp’s 0x000Anot back to us yet. James “Whitey” Bulger was more like a character from a 17th-century folk tale than a late-20th-century criminal, the sort of figure who’d murder innocents on wooded roadways and then, with a shrug, toss their bloody…
Don’t Be Afraid to Feel Zhang Yimou’s Coming Home is what the movies were made for. In the mid-20th century, movie audiences understood the value of a good melodrama: A picture like Now, Voyager or Black Narcissus or almost anything by Douglas Sirk could be an urn into which you…
’70s Breakdown Elisabeth Moss makes Queen of Earth’s unspooling vital. Sometimes a face is enough to anchor a movie. In writer-director Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth, Elisabeth Moss plays Catherine, a young city dweller who, after recently suffering both her father’s death by suicide and a crushing breakup, treks…
