How much can you take away and still have a movie? Steven Knight’s Locke is an experiment in reducing contemporary screen storytelling to its irreducible essentials, which isn’t quite the same thing as being an “experimental” film, despite the ravishing early reviews from England. It shows us just one actor,…
The temperature hangs in the mid-70s in Miami, and New York City-based actor/writer/director John Turturro remarks, “It’s just so nice to be outside. I’m so happy to be outside.” Though it’s breezy, his neat crop of salt-and-pepper hair remains unshakable. He sits in the shade of a large gazebo at…
Hola, Hollywood. Phoenix College’s 14th Annual Latino Film Festival will include six movies that explore the complexities of Latin cultures in communities across the United States and South America. The festival, which offers six days of independent and documentary screenings, is open to students and the general public alike. Perhaps…
The vampires who walk among us — and they do — are not the Twilight kind, or the True Blood kind, or even the Buffy kind. In the world of Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, the director’s most emotionally direct film since Dead Man, and maybe his finest, period,…
Going bald is the best thing that ever happened to Jude Law. Britain’s prettiest export did the best he could with his burden of good looks. He played a genetic ideal in Gattaca, a robotic ideal in A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and in The Talented Mr. Ripley, his golden god perfection…
Has it ever occurred to contemporary commercial filmmakers that maybe audiences could take a movie’s word for it that a character has been tortured? That perhaps implication and skilled acting could communicate the idea with sufficient power, and that we might all be spared the screaming and limb-breaking and slow-motion…
Tom Hiddleston can pull off extreme looks. In The Avengers, he strutted around in Loki’s two-foot horned helmet. For Midnight in Paris, he finessed F. Scott Fitzgerald’s prim finger waves. And in his latest, Jim Jarmusch’s vampire romance Only Lovers Left Alive, Hiddleston lounges bare-chested in velvet-cuffed robes. The only…
The sexual politics of Nick Cassavetes’ decidedly un-romantic comedy The Other Woman are intriguingly European and, at their core, kind of groovy. Wronged Connecticut wifey-wife Kate (Leslie Mann) seeks out her husband’s mistress, sexy city-slicker and high-powered lawyer Carly (Cameron Diaz), looking to her for answers: Why is my husband…
Since 2002, the year Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man hit theaters, the other Spider-Man, the hero of the actual comic books, has joined the Avengers, revealed his secret identity to the world, and become a highly paid inventor who has engineered, among other marvels, a limitless energy source science has dubbed “Parker…
Sometimes it’s helpful to know certain details about how a film has come together. And sometimes it’s just so much information. Transcendence, the directorial debut of Christopher Nolan’s go-to cinematographer, Wally Pfister, was shot on film rather than digitally, as most big Hollywood movies (and nearly all small ones) are…
When Wally Pfister won an Oscar for Inception, his sixth film with Christopher Nolan, he went home and put the statuette on his mantel. “And then it moved to the corner, and then my office, and then the closet because you go away for a few months, and then it…
It’s been 5 million years since humanity hauled itself from the swamp, and according to Joe director David Gordon Green, we’re devolving back into muck. While the stoners of Green’s Pineapple Express regressed from men to boys after a few puffs of weed, this grimly beautiful drama starring Nicholas Cage…
Time to brush up on your italiano. The Italian Film Festival USA recently added Tempe, Arizona, to its 11-stop schedule. This year marks the 10th edition of the fest, which brings contemporary Italian films stateside to cities including Boulder, Colorado, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Don’t worry; there will be subtitles…
Gillian Robespierre’s Obvious Child isn’t your typical romantic comedy. Jenny Slate stars as Donna Stern, a charmingly foul-mouthed Williamsburg stand-up, whose cheating boyfriend (Paul Briganti) dumps her for another woman. She goes through the typical stages of relationship loss. She gets drunk, leaves him many inebriated messages, finds comfort in…
All eyes were on the Late Show this past week after host David Letterman announced on Thursday, April 3, that he would retire from the late night talk show in 2015. Immediately, the Internet was abuzz with rumors of who would fill the shoes of Letterman, who’s hosted the Late…
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio can’t carry a tune. Yet America’s toughest sheriff sings both the intro and outro to Randy Murray’s documentary The Joe Show. Bordering on funny and sickening, he starts the show with a poor take on “My Way,” made famous by Frank Sinatra. For the finale,…
It’s no surprise that indie documentary For No Good Reason drew a large audience at the Phoenix Film Festival. The star power of Johnny Depp and Ralph Steadman, along with real footage of Hunter S. Thompson and William S. Burroughs, was definitely a contributing factor. Since attendees didn’t get the…
“I’ve interviewed a lot of nasty characters over the years,” says a cheerful Errol Morris over lunch on a bright Los Angeles day. “I’m a connoisseur of bullshit.” He’s sampled some of the finest: Holocaust deniers, murderers swearing their innocence, a beauty queen who claims she only kidnapped and raped…
Any Yanks concerned that the Brits outclass us may find relief in Alan Partridge, an import comedy that at first seems to stand as evidence of some over-there comic superiority. Compared to our broad Ron Burgundys, Steve Coogan’s local broadcast ass Alan Partridge stands as sharp, incisive parody, a desperate,…
The most perfect works of art are those suspended between conception and realization, the ones that seize you up with how great they were gonna be. (Well, those and Busby Berkeley numbers.) Alejandro Jodorowsky’s daft, daring, surrealist, possibly impossible adaptation of Dune, Frank Herbert’s spice-mining science-fiction novel that later proved…
Errol Morris can’t penetrate the man behind Iraq. As its subtitle suggests, one reason Errol Morris’ 2003 documentary The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara proved so resonant is that its subject was partly a proxy for his most notorious professional successor, the decidedly…
The promise of seeing Scarlett Johansson fully nude is probably enough to lure lots of people into Jonathan Glazer’s alien-among-us fantasy Under the Skin, and the vision doesn’t disappoint: Her figure, seen in long shot, is a grand and glowing thing; she has one of those butts shaped, adorably, like…
