Search results for: Oscars

Actual angel from heaven and French Bulldog-Chihuahua mix Roxy is 15 weeks old, weighs in at a mere 6 pounds, and will be the first-ever Arizona shelter dog to represent her home state in Animal Planet's annual Puppy Bowl. Yes, we agree that she is literally the cutest. And, no,...

Let's break the bad news this way. Maria Bamford's new Netflix series isn't a disaster. It's sometimes funny — it's got comic genius Maria Bamford in almost every scene! — but only its finest moments bear the stamp of sensibility. Too often, this fitful, clamorous show feels Bamford-flavored rather than...

There’s a scene during the first half of Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Apocalypse that is so emotionally resonant, so well-put-together and so quiet that you might briefly forget you’re watching a superhero film. It involves a raid by some Polish officers in the remote forest where Erik Lehnsherr, aka Magneto (Michael...

There was a time when the summer movie season was a season, sandwiched between Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends. By the 21st century, the start date drifted back to the first weekend in May. This year, the superhero flicks started arriving with Deadpool’s release on February 12. Only two...

The biggest story at this year's Sundance Film Festival was the record-breaking bidding war for The Birth of a Nation, a prestige biopic about rebellious slave Nat Turner. When Fox Searchlight snatched it for $17.5 million — $5 million more than any other flick in the festival’s history — their...

Sesame Street has relocated to an alternate universe. Everything there is the same, but also slightly different. Blame gentrification, or the show’s new network, or the hostile scheming of that old meany, Oscar the Grouch. Whatever the reason, every child’s favorite inner city suburb has changed. The venerable kiddie show...

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...

Jonathan Pine, the hero of The Night Manager, might have a syrupy voice and skin tanned to a glowing bronze, but in other respects he’s a classic John le Carré creation. Pine (Tom Hiddleston) makes his living unshowily and in the dark, at a swank hotel, juggling front-desk phone calls,...

But what about the meaninglessness of everything? William Monahan's Mojave is one of those '90s-style chatty-killer movies, mixed with one of those '90s-style guns-in-the-desert existential cheapies, the kind of picture where good-looking dudes shooting each other is passed off as elemental and beautiful rather than just what it actually is...

If one of your resolutions is to see more movies this year, we applaud your priorities and look forward to helping you achieve that goal — starting right now. There are several local screenings to check out in January 2016, as well as a couple of big releases to see,...

Critics rarely receive love from filmmakers. Last year’s Best Picture Oscar winner, Birdman, featured a vengeful harpy of a theater reviewer (played by Lindsay Duncan) hellbent on annihilating a play before she’d even seen it. Birdman was joined in its release year by other unfair portraits of critics in Top...

Over the past week, proud University of Arizona students have been closing their collegiate chapters in ceremonies all around campus, including Friday, May 13's mega-commencement at Arizona Stadium. It's been quite a journey for these graduates, now being set out into the world and facing their futures. It's an excitement...

The Danish Girl, Tom Hooper's portrait of Jazz Age painters Gerda Wegener and her spouse, Einar, who butterflied into Lili Elbe via the first sexual-assignment surgery, is about gender and it isn't. Like its subject, it's fatally resolved to fit an ideal: the noble Oscar-bait biopic. If the script swapped...

As cinematic year 2015 reaches its end, the FOMO specter threatens to haunt us all. If you pored over the results of our film poll and felt aghast at how many apparently great movies you’ve yet to see, here at last is a chance to catch up without braving traffic. —Michael...

The heads of the City Dionysia, the Grecian playwriting competition that pitted Aeschylus against Sophocles and can be considered the original Oscars, had a rule: no original characters. Instead, the best creative minds of a generation — or really, a millennium — exhausted themselves finding new spins on, say, Medea...

There's essentially one joke in the Kung-Fu Panda movies. A ridiculous, adorable creature executes some extravagant action-flick flourish — vaulting over roofs, dropping a bad guy, striking a poster-perfect superhero pose. Then the battle music fades and that adorable creature breaks badass character to remind us it's totally relatable, even...