5 Best Things to Do Fourth of July Weekend in Metro Phoenix

Young Frankenstein We can’t get over the fact that Mel Brooks wrote the words and music to all of the songs in the stage musical version of Young Frankenstein (except for “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” or, as the monster sings it, “Oo atha Rih”). Dude is mad talented – he…

Infinitely Polar Bear Finds Truth in a Manic Mind

There’s no one right way to show mental illness in the movies, yet there are hundreds of ways to get it wrong. Even though certain disorders come with specific traits, a diagnosis is not a human being, and doomed is the actor who just cycles through symptoms, rather than working…

Gemma Bovery Is a Romance Whose Lead Aches for a Tragedy

A romance about wanting to see a romance, a comic tragedy about an onlooker willing something tragic, Anne Fontaine’s Flaubert-inspired meta-pleasure Gemma Bovery takes as its subject the act of watching the lives around us — and of wishing those lives were literature. Or films: Here’s a French film thick…

Groove with Eden and a Life Lived for Paradise’s Beats

Mia Hansen-Løve’s lucid and shimmering movie memoir Eden traces the sloping rise and even more meandering fall of a French techno DJ across some 20 years. Eden isn’t even about anything as broad as electronic dance music: It deals largely with the specific techno subgenre known as garage — at…

5 Movies to See in Metro Phoenix This July

When it’s this hot outside, the question isn’t which movie/s should you see, it’s which movies should you see multiple times to avoid being outside. Even a bad movie is better than braving the raging inferno that we call home this time of year, but we’ve also rounded up some…

The Men of Magic Mike XXL Look Great but Could Grow Up Some

Steven Soderbergh’s 2012 Magic Mike was a tease. The ads tempted audiences with sweaty chests and thrusting crotches, but after Soderbergh lured us in to his all-male strip club, he turned on the lights to show us the squalor. His hunks were drugged and morally decayed. The women — the…

Arnold’s Back, but Genisys Is a Past-Future Muddle

Five films into the franchise, Terminator: Genisys feels like a VHS cassette that’s been rewound and recorded over for 31 years. Director Alan Taylor (of the unmemorable Thor: The Dark World) gives us images — a thumbs-up, an abandoned factory, a liquid-metal cop smashing through the windshield of a car…

Diverting Canine Weepie Max Offers No Surprises

Even within the strictest formulas of today’s superhero-driven Hollywood, the experienced craftsman with a genuine enthusiasm for the form can find precious moments that are able to accommodate his or her personality. One such example is the director Boaz Yakin, who, following a pair of personal indies (1994’s Fresh and…

Laugh and Laugh with Seth MacFarlane’s Ted 2

Some movies are indefensible, and Ted 2 is one of them. Not only is this a movie about a libidinous, foul-mouthed stuffed bear; it’s the sequel to an earlier movie about a libidinous, foul-mouthed stuffed bear. But I laughed and laughed at Ted 2 — as I did at the…

Dig a Grave for Joe Dante’s Horror-Comedy Burying the Ex

Of course a 2015 Joe Dante horror-comedy would be some kind of throwback. The Gremlins director has spent a career idealizing the creature-feature jollies of his youth, jolting audiences with wittily vicious nostalgia. Dante’s goofy monster movies have always been more toothy than their antecedents — more technically accomplished, fully…

10 Characters to Watch in Orange Is the New Black‘s Third Season

Prison life is reliably repetitive, but conditions can be frighteningly unstable, too. Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black, which returns June 12 for its third season, reflects that paradoxical state of affairs by delivering more of the same — heartfelt but complicated relationships, inspired capers, compelling personalities, stomach-twisting flips in…

Jurassic World Capably Stomps, Roars, and Awes

In Jurassic World, Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic Park reboot — set 22 years after dinosaurs started walking the Earth, again — brontosauruses, stegosauruses, and velociraptors have become old hat, sort of like the mechanical Abe Lincoln at Disneyland. Meanwhile, the habitat around them has gone Vegas: Isla Nublar, home of the…

Unsettling Doc The Nightmare Reveals the Horror in Your Mind

Twenty years back, at the height of the UFO boom, the truest believers in alien abduction scenarios would argue that their most compelling evidence was the commonalities between regular people’s stories of nighttime visitations. Even under hypnosis, “abductees” testified to remarkably consistent waking-dream terrors: an alert immobility, shadowed and mostly…

5 Movies to See in Metro Phoenix This June

You may not have a summer break like you did when you were a kid, but that doesn’t mean you have to be a grown up at the movies. Let’s save the art house fare and thought-provoking movies for later this year. For June, it’s all about being a kid…