Use quotes to search for a phrase or name: "toy story", or "brooklyn bridge".

Article

Seven Films We Look Forward to Distracting Us in Early 2017

2017 looks like it won't be an improvement over 2016, so here are some promising films — either reviewed or previewed — to distract you in the next three months. In keeping with the pessimism most of the country is feeling, we’re also considering "what could be bad" in the...
Article

Nacho Vigalondo on Balancing Human Life and Kaiju Rampages in Colossal

Over four features and countless shorts, Spanish director Nacho Vigalondo has cemented his status as a director who mixes genre elements with surprisingly personal stories and playful narrative trickery. His mind-bending first feature Timecrimes (2007) starts off as a horror movie, then turns into a time-travel tale and finally the...
Article

Playing by Old Rules, Warren Beatty’s Howard Hughes Drama Stumbles

When last we saw Howard Hughes onscreen, Leonardo DiCaprio was repeating "the way of the future" ad infinitum as he gazed into the mirror. Warren Beatty's long-in-the-making Rules Don't Apply isn't nearly as concerned with the future as Martin Scorsese's The Aviator was, looking instead to the past and all...
Article

The State of Action Filmmaking, 2017

In the '80s and '90s, there were action movies. They starred muscly guys like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone, or martial artists from Jean-Claude Van Damme to Cynthia Rothrock, or actors who were dedicated to the physical demands of the genre, like Bruce Willis or Wesley Snipes. They mostly told...
Article

Sundance Kicks Off with Al Gore’s Oddly Optimistic An Inconvenient Sequel

I’m still trying to decide if Sundance’s decision to kick off its 2017 festival with An Inconvenient Sequel, Al Gore’s follow-up to his influential (and terrifying) climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth, is an act of political confrontation or a sign of helplessness. (Or both?) What kind of message does...
Article

Drawn to Misery: BoJack Horseman‘s Third Season Is Its Best Yet

Just over a minute into the third season of the Netflix animated comedy BoJack Horseman, an entertainment-news interviewer asks our hero, “What would an Oscar nomination mean for BoJack Horseman?” The rest of the season is dedicated to answering that question, tracking BoJack (voiced by Will Arnett) from press junkets...
Article

Coldplay’s Concert Was Full of Heart, British Charm, and Confetti

What Coldplay is these days is increasingly rare: A young-ish rock band that inspires a monoculture and plays to adoring crowds in arenas nationwide. To illustrate: Coldplay headlined the Super Bowl halftime show last year, a show where only the least offensive, most broadly popular artists get to perform. It...
Article

Tense Comedy Miss Stevens Puts Responsibility on a Teacher With Lots to Learn

Lily Rabe’s discomfiting performance anchors the fascinatingly uneasy comedy-drama Miss Stevens. Julia Hart’s film — about a young, slightly hapless English teacher who must chaperone three students to a state drama competition — has a premise that could easily invite cliché. You half expect it to become either an inspirational...
Article

Uneasy Lies the Head of Queen Elizabeth in Netflix’s Epic The Crown

Netflix’s The Crown, a drama series about the life and times of Queen Elizabeth II, is the kind of sumptuous but tasteful British royals porn you’d expect from Ye Olde Masterpiece Theatre, not from the streaming giant that gave us BoJack Horseman and Stranger Things. A $130 million joint American/British...
Article

The 30 Best Concerts in Phoenix in May 2017

The countdown is on, y’all. We're weeks, if not days, away from the time of year that pretty much everyone in the Valley loathes with a passion: the onslaught of excessive amounts of heat. And, we’re sorry to say, there’s little you can do about it, except for buying a...
Article

The Nine Best Concerts in Phoenix This Week

It’s pretty safe to say that for most of you, the week ahead is going to be dominated by the Thanksgiving holiday. In other words, several days packed with friends, family, and feasting, as well as some drama thrown into the mix for good measure. But that doesn’t mean you...
Article

In Gleason, an NFL Hero Faces ALS and the Loss of His Body

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...