Sure, she’s played supporting roles on the silver screen, but our Phoenix hasn’t had a lead role in many movies. So it took us by surprise to find a glossy postcard at the Downtown Phoenix Public Market advertising PHX: a film by Stewart Schuster. Excited, we anxiously flipped over to read a small description:…
MacGruber (Will Forte), a highly decorated soldier of fortune known for “making life-saving inventions out of household materials,” faked his death and went into hiding after his fiancée (Maya Rudolph) was killed at their wedding, likely by MacGruber’s arch enemy, wealthy industrialist Dieter Von Cunth (Val Kilmer). Years later, when…
Hello, fellow Twilighters! *air kiss* (Yes, we’re all BFFs, didn’t you know?) If the reaction to the Eclipse trailer played at this past weekend’s Iron Man performances is any indication, the June 30 midnight premiere will be standing room only. Good thing tickets are going on sale now. Harkins Theatres…
Is it an accident that Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood plays like a rousing love letter to the Tea Party movement? It’s certainly something of a surprise. When the movie was announced in 2007 with the title Nottingham, reports suggested that it would sympathize with the normally vilified Sheriff of Nottingham…
Another movie, not as awful or deluded as this one, might one day find better use for the easygoing vibe between Queen Latifah and Common, the stars of Just Wright, a romantic comedy (for the ladies) with basketball and cameoing NBA players in it (for the fellas). That absolutely no…
Besides doing super-fun married stuff like yard work, going to Costco, and leaving the bathroom door open, New Times writers Laura Hahnefeld and Jay Bennett go to the movies. Laura: So I guess there’s an Avengers movie coming out. Jay: Yeah, poor Robert Downey Jr. He looked like he was…
As Iron Man 2 begins, Tony Stark — mechanical genius, Forbes 400 perennial, the pop-star CEO of Stark Industries — has dropped any pretense of a secret identity. Stark is garishly “out” as Iron Man, performing a one-man air show before touching down to host his Stark Expo, which transforms…
More than 225 people packed the Harkins Valley Art Theatre on Friday, April 30, for the sold-out premiere screening of the documentary 9500 Liberty and a Q&A session with co-director Eric Byler. The film chronicles the heated battle over an Immigration Resolution (drafted by the same folks who brought us…
Ken Rotcop is a Hollywood legend. If you haven’t heard of him before, that’s because most of his 40+ years in the movie and television industries have been spent behind the scenes, writing for game shows and television series’ and heading up four film studios including Embassy Pictures and Hanna-Barbera. He also supervised production…
I took the 6-year-old who lives in my house to the Sunday-afternoon sneak preview of Furry Vengeance. The boy’s a savvy consumer of popular culture for kids — my greatest parenting triumph thus far. He knew from the myriad Disney Channel commercials (the movie stars Matt Prokop of High School…
Writer Andy Diggle dedicated his snappy DC comic books “The Losers” to ’80s screenwriting superstar Shane Black, creator of the Lethal Weapon series. But in adapting “The Losers” for film, director Sylvain White and screenwriters James Vanderbilt and Peter Berg strain to achieve the pleasurable mix of cheap laughs and…
Kick-Ass, the Matthew Vaughn-directed adaptation of Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s graphic novel, sets itself up as an unadulterated exposé of the teenage mind. Tired of being mugged by high school thugs in a Manhattan that’s notably scummier than the real thing, our hero Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson, a…
“We are not these people! We are a boring couple from New Jersey!” complains Claire Foster (Tina Fey) to her husband, Phil (Steve Carell), about halfway through Date Night, the latest high-gloss, middle-to-low-brow would-be blockbuster from director Shawn Levy (Cheaper by the Dozen, Just Married). Phil and Claire are middle-class,…
The script, costumes, and props of The Last Song work hard to establish Miley Cyrus’ dramatic-role bona fides as the 17-year-old crosses over from G to PG: Her character, constantly sneering high school grad Ronnie Miller, sports a tiny nose stud, stomps on the beach in Doc Martens, believes meat…
A contemporary crime drama edged with Greek tragedy, Ajami is an untidy, despairing, oddly exhilarating joint venture by writer-directors Scandar Copti, an Israeli Arab, and Yaron Shani, an Israeli Jew. Though its unwieldy cast and multiple storylines might better lend themselves to a television series, the movie teems with life,…
‘Price was twelve, bruh.’ ‘Say bruh. Them twelve hundred was for eight pieces.’ A deal’s going down, yeah. But not the sort we’re used to witnessing between black men on a television show set in an American city. Certainly not a David Simon drama on HBO. Yet before even a…
Lost boy John Hughes was inducted into the pantheon this month when the Academy devoted a moving Oscar-night tribute to the departed writer-director. But do you actually remember being a teenage moviegoer in the 1980s? It wasn’t all some kind of wonderful. Hughes movies came out twice a year, if…
Noah Baumbach talks about his new film, Greenberg, the DIY ethos, and learning to drive. Noah Baumbach is 40 years old. He just learned how to drive. A native New Yorker, the writer/director started spending time in Los Angeles when dating his current wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh, but for years…
The tagline for the recently concluded 2010 South by Southwest Film Festival was “Tomorrow Happens Here,” slick marketing shorthand for the event’s reputation as a test tube for new cinematic trends and a breeding ground for incestuous indie collaborations (most of the filmmakers now associated with mumblecore first met each…
Sad, funny, and acutely self-conscious, Noah Baumbach’s new movie is the sort of mordant character study that people imagine were common in the ’70s. Greenberg is unafraid to project a downbeat worldview or feature an impossible protagonist — I’d be hard put to name one as maddening as the eponymous…
There’s an obvious stunt element to the casting of The Runaways: a punked-up, barely legal Kristen Stewart and a still-underage, barely dressed Dakota Fanning begging for street cred by playing dress-up as, respectively, Joan Jett and Cherie Currie, front girls of the oversexed ’70s-era teen proto-punk sensation The Runaways. Watch…
Better late than never — a bang-bang pulse-pounder predicated on the Bush administration’s deliberate fabrication of WMD in Iraq. Paul Greengrass’ expertly assembled Green Zone has evidently been parked for some time on Universal’s shelf. Had the movie been released during the 2008 election season, it might have been something…
