Search results for: Oscars

Though based on actual 2001 events in Ohio that caused an unmanned freight train, laden with toxic waste, to go haywire, Unstoppable could just as well be set in the shining sun of Reagan's 1980s. As the driverless locomotive begins gathering speed across rural Pennsylvania, bedecked with autumn leaves, it...

In the mood for some gambling? The Talk Cinema film series, a cross-city event that gives advanced screenings of independent and foreign films, will hit the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts on Oct. 19. Tickets are available now, but there's a catch -- you won't know what movie is...

Jack Goes Boating is Philip Seymour Hoffman's movie — it's his directorial debut; he stars as its namesake sad sack; he wears his hair in those terrible dreadlocks that he covered with a big woolen hat at the Oscars last spring — but let's talk about John Ortiz instead. Yes,...

Something about October must say, "It's film festival time." We wrote earlier about the Talk Cinema Film Series in Scottsdale starting Oct. 19. Just up the road, starting tomorrow, is the 10th Scottsdale International Film Festival, which continues through Tuesday, October 5. With 27 films from 20 countries, it might...

After Fox Searchlight's Amelia spectacularly flamed out last October, the studio tries again to grab awards-season honors with another biopic starring and executive-produced by Hilary Swank. Gone is the Kansas-patrician enunciation and smartly tailored Depression-era trousers; as Conviction's Betty Anne Waters, a Massachusetts high school dropout and single mom who...

Classiest. Comic. Book. Movie. Ever. Not the best. Not the worst. Just the classiest — Helen Mirren (and Morgan Freeman and John Malkovich and Brian Cox and Richard Dreyfuss) can spruce up any pulp. As far as comic-book adaptations go, though, Red is a little closer to the bright side...

I'm Still Here — "that Joaquin Phoenix movie" — capitalizes on an anxiety that's very of-the-moment, uniting pop cultural phenomena as seemingly disparate as the too-stupid/good-to-be-true Jersey Shore characters, James Franco's baffling side careers as a professional student and soap opera stud, and pretty much every thing having to do...

Movie stars make a living peddling distinct, definable personalities. Edward Norton, a movie star who might have enjoyed the comparative anonymity of a character actor if not for the gossip-media market value of a few of his habits (an aggressive perfectionism that has earned him a "reputation" for "being difficult,"...

Lebanon, written and directed by Samuel Maoz, is not just the year's most impressive first feature but also the strongest new movie of any kind I've seen in 2010. Actually, Lebanon — which won the Golden Lion at Venice, after being rejected by Berlin and Cannes — hardly seems like...

"No Damn Trespassing, Beware of Mule!" warns the hand-carved sign posted near the high-country cabin of Tennessee recluse Felix Bush (Robert Duvall), whose abrupt decision to re-engage with the larger world propels Get Low, an imperfect but rewarding new film. It is 1938, and Felix, who's been in a self-imposed...

Salt, famously the Spy Flick Rewritten for Angelina Jolie After Tom Cruise Dropped Out, has been publicized as the cinematic equivalent of the 19th Amendment: finally, a level playing field for female action stars! This is mostly bullshit, of course —Jolie's Evelyn Salt is not the first action hero to...