Daniel Day-Lewis and Steven Spielberg ably fill the hat. There’s an unfun tendency in American life to fictionalize our national heroes as rigid statue-people who only speak as though they are delivering commencement addresses with a kind of unlovable anti-charisma that would inhibit anyone in real life from becoming a…
The first few minutes of Lincoln play out like a parody of the expectations of Steven Spielberg’s detractors. The Great Emancipator rests like a humble Solomon upon a hard wooden chair, surrounded by freely mixing black and white soldiers of that great war of his. One black soldier dares to…
That the American cinema is deader than Dillinger is a fact no right-thinking observer unwilling to be laughed out of the room would even think of denying today. To do the current round of think-piece writers one better, we will add that not only are the movies dead, but they…
Silver Linings Playbook, which stars Bradley Cooper as a manic-depressive man-child attempting to get his life back together after a breakdown, won the coveted Audience Award at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and subsequently shot to the top of most Oscar prognosticators’ Best Picture short list. The film’s…
Cult animator Don Hertzfeldt’s award winning three short films involving the life and times of stick-figure “Bill” will be shown Saturday, November 24 at Phoenix Center for the Arts. “Everything Will Be OK,” I Am So Proud of You,” and “It’s Such a Beautiful Day” are three separate short films…
After having created 25 short films and two full-length films since its inception in 2010, the folks at local film studio Running Wild Films have set their ambitions high for 2013 with the “52 Shorts in 52 Weeks” project. According to the project’s director/producer, Travis Mills, each of the 52…
The way films come and go, in and out of theaters, usually it’s easier to miss a movie than catch it. That makes planning ahead a must when it comes to moviegoing in the Valley. That’s also why we’ve handpicked five must-see flicks screening this month to add to the…
If Hollywood’s rut du jour is the origin story as bid for franchise immortality, you can’t say that Skyfall — the 23rd “official” James Bond film in 50 years — isn’t on trend. Eight years ago in Casino Royale, Daniel Craig’s first outing as Bond, we learned that 007 owes…
The winner of the Grand Jury Prize for documentary at Sundance, Eugene Jarecki’s The House I Live In, an occasionally muddled disquisition on the colossal failure of the war on drugs, rehashes much that will be familiar to even the most casual reader of newspapers: that this “war” is waged…
You know those “actor” kids who casually brag about their Hollywood agents and past commercial acting gigs? Yeah, well Hunter Gomez isn’t one of them. He’s a pretty normal kid — except that any given Monday, Wednesday, of Friday might find him in the booth recording voices for the TV…
Tucson born and raised writer/director Andy Viner revisits his hometown with the sex-comedy/horror flick “Dick Night,” and answers any question (or nightmare) you might have about what happens in those remote middle-of-nowhere desert neighborhoods. The film follows the recently heartbroken, Rachel, who was left at the alter by her ex-fiancé…
The yammering about “Oscar gold” and Denzel Washington’s potential three-peat will soon reach a deafening pitch, but such noise can only embarrass a fine character study like Flight, whose prevailing tone is a heavy, elemental melancholy. The mood is there from the opening pan across the Orlando airport under gray,…
When it comes to cost-cutting, downsizing, and philosophical and practical compromise, how low is it possible to go before there’s nothing left to cut — and nowhere to go but up? Detropia, the evocative new documentary from filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (Jesus Camp), is a portrait of a…
It’s hard out there for a video game villain: always being attacked, never given the benefit of the doubt, and forever pigeonholed into a role no one wants to see you escape. Such is the fate of Wreck-It Ralph (John C. Reilly), the bad guy in an old-school arcade game…
Attention, Eon Productions, Daniel Craig, and Heineken: James Bond is not a beer drinker! Sure, I know. Getting all worked up about the new James Bond installment is like freaking out about a new Tim Burton movie — past glories don’t justify contemporary relevance. The year 2012 marks 50 years…
Sean Baker’s Starlet stars Dree Hemingway (Ernest’s great-granddaughter) as Jane, a 21-year-old “girl next door” porn performer whose off-hours are spent getting high in the Valley house she shares with fellow “starlet” Melissa (Stella Maeve) and Melissa’s small-time impresario boyfriend (James Ransone). The story in the movie is the stuff…
Political advertising has been around since the age of politics (and since anyone thought to scratch their candidate’s name into stone), but the art of sharing information while visually persuading voters and slamming your political opponents has evolved since it began airing on television in 1952. Marshall Reese and Antoni…
If your idea of a silver screen hit includes history, crime, and a healthy dose of art, this is your weekend — as part of the the Greater Phoenix Jewish Film Festival, “Portrait of Wally,” is debuting October 26 through 28 at Phoenix Art Museum. Austrian painter Egon Schiele, most…
Gossip Girl and The O.C., the two teen TV shows created in the past decade by 36-year-old Josh Schwartz, are sly bait-and-switches. Both are easily marketable for their hot (mess) fashion-plate stars, wide-eyed luxury fetishism, soapy season arcs, and savvy self-reference, but both are also, at heart, deeply old-fashioned in…
The trailer for Cloud Atlas, the gargantuan new movie of David Mitchell’s 2004 novel that took two Wachowski siblings and Tom Tykwer to adapt, looks less like a preview than a whole slate of coming attractions, so many and varied are the times and places where it touches down. The…
As director Ted Kotcheff told Senses of Cinema magazine, when Aussie grindhouse creeper Wake in Fright premièred at the Cannes Film Festival in 1971, “There was an American seated in one of the rows immediately behind me, and he kept saying: ‘Wow! This is great!'” That American turned out to…
At around the four-minute mark of my first viewing of the Cloud Atlas trailer, as the M83 track swelled to its bursting point and a hoverbike darted through future Korea, I remember e-mailing and GChatting at least a dozen friends with a link to the preview and my take: “Holy…
