With found footage having long ago supplanted torture porn as the horror subgenre du jour, the prospect of a new Eli Roth movie might seem even more dubious than it was during the director’s heyday. The Green Inferno arrives in theaters two years after making the festival rounds and a…
Some veteran filmmakers try to capture the younger generation and fail to get it right, coming up with characters and faux with-it dialogue that invite lots of “Oh, Mom!” eye-rolling. That’s not the problem with writer-director Nancy Meyers’ The Intern, in which retiree Robert De Niro finds meaning in life…
The good news about the Richard Gere drama about the bad news of New York’s enduring homeless crisis? Time Out of Mind, written and directed by Oren Moverman, is stubbornly, respectfully unflashy, Manhattan neorealism steeped more in reportage than in the clichés of prestige films. A prideful man slow to…
First things first: This is not the list of movies you’d see on a syllabus for any classic films class. Some of these might appear there, but this list wasn’t made to teach you which films released before 1975 were the best made. Instead, we’ve compiled a list of truly…
Phoenix native Mikaela Shwer’s Don’t Tell Anyone (No Le Digas a Nadie) premières on the PBS series POV on Monday, September 21. The documentary tells the story of Angy Rivera, whom Shwer met in New York when Rivera was undocumented. Rivera grew up in New York City after her fleeing Colombia…
Space 55 Theatre announced on Thursday, September 17, that Duane Daniels is its newly appointed artistic director. Daniels steps into the role previously held by Shawna Franks,who founded the independent downtown Phoenix theater space in 2006. Franks has moved to Chicago, where she’s recently worked with Steppenwolf Theatre Company. “I…
Charlie Kaufman is a cartographer of the soul. You can picture him hunched over parchment accurately inking each dark river and, off to the side, cautioning that there be dragons. What makes Kaufman cinema’s best psychoanalyst is a contradiction. He sees people for who we are — hurtful, hopeful, lovely,…
“I’ve turned into this kind of crazy optimist,” Michael Moore admits in his new documentary Where to Invade Next, his first film in six years. At 61, the gadfly savant has mellowed. Instead of charging into rooms, he shuffles, the American flag wrapped around his shoulders like a grandmother’s shawl. Conservatives…
Still in Hiding Black Mass is strong, 0x000Abut Johnny Depp’s 0x000Anot back to us yet. James “Whitey” Bulger was more like a character from a 17th-century folk tale than a late-20th-century criminal, the sort of figure who’d murder innocents on wooded roadways and then, with a shrug, toss their bloody…
Don’t Be Afraid to Feel Zhang Yimou’s Coming Home is what the movies were made for. In the mid-20th century, movie audiences understood the value of a good melodrama: A picture like Now, Voyager or Black Narcissus or almost anything by Douglas Sirk could be an urn into which you…
’70s Breakdown Elisabeth Moss makes Queen of Earth’s unspooling vital. Sometimes a face is enough to anchor a movie. In writer-director Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth, Elisabeth Moss plays Catherine, a young city dweller who, after recently suffering both her father’s death by suicide and a crushing breakup, treks…
Whether you want to shop for holiday goods or maneuver your way through spooky corn mazes, there is plenty to do this fall, and something for everyone. Maybe you’d like to check out some intriguing underground films, or see locals dress up for costumed theme parades? From underground film festivals…
“Scientology’s Dirty Tricks: Then and Now” with Tony Ortega While it’s easy to make Scientology into a punchline, thanks to its celebrity followers and sci-fi roots, what shouldn’t be ignored is the church’s ability to draw in adherents and keep them in its clutches. Journalist Tony Ortega, formerly of New…
LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson found out first-hand that Michael Shannon is a pretty stern Monopoly player during a recent game with the actor, who portrays a tortured Orlando real-estate baron in the upcoming 99 Homes. Nicholson and Village Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl open this week’s Voice Film…
Disappointing action reboot The Transporter Refueled is so thoroughly misconceived that it took us a couple of extra days to pinpoint all the ways it leaves audiences disappointed — and possibly pining for the relatively sturdy drive-in/grindhouse-ready exploitation films of yesteryear. Refueled, a reboot of the adequate 2002 Jason Statham…
The success of Jean-Jacques Annaud’s handsome lupine adventure Wolf Totem relies in large part on the ratio between wolf and totem. There are wolves — those howling, majestic hunters of the Mongolian grasslands — and then there are the many things they stand for: freedom, teamwork, the delicate harmony of…
The upcoming Steve Jobs documentary from Alex Gibney (Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine) is worth seeing even if you’re tired of Apple fanboys — if only for the curious parallels between Apple worshippers and the members of the Church of Scientology, the subject of Gibney’s other recent doc…
Director Alex Gibney’s choice to follow this spring’s Scientology slam Going Clear with the fascinating portrait Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine might seem like an about-face. The first documentary clinically eviscerated a religion that everyone loves to loathe. Apple CEO Steve Jobs, however, is adulated to an incredible…
A comedy too listless to bother crafting jokes or comic incidents, a character study centered on a sweet-natured prick it’s hard to believe could actually exist tumbleweeding into a job at a lube shop, 7 Chinese Brothers is a go-nowhere shrug of a movie, the kind of indie that might…
Men Slog By Stephanie Zacharek A sense of humor will take you far in life, even along a daunting stretch of the Appalachian Trail. In his hugely popular 1998 book A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson chronicled his attempt to hike the full length of the trail, from Georgia…
The first famous tennis player was King Louis X of France. Nicknamed Louis the Quarreler for his domestic politics, meaning he was likely a real pain to the ref, King Louis is renowned for two facts in athletic lore: He invented the indoor tennis court, and, after a hard, hot…
There’s steady, scary thrill in the final third of Meru, the latest attempt to conquer the climb-and-tweak-the-nose-of-God mountaineering documentary, a genre that has yet to reach its apex. The terrible beauty of the Shark’s Fin point of northern India’s Mount Meru is enough to make this worth seeking out on…
