Amid a month of not-so stellar releases (we’re looking your way, Fantastic Four), Phoenix Film Festival offers a great reason to head to the theater. For the first time ever, the must-attend spring movie event debuts its summer showcase. Kicking off the showcase is Noah Baumbach’s latest Greta Gerwig vehicle, Mistress America,…
“This conversation is the best one I ever had,” David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) tells us as The End of the Tour wraps up, and the movie, a pleasantly talky chamber piece, gives us welcome bursts of it. That long chat, with a David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel) abashed by the…
It’s heartbreaking that, in his last dramatic film, Robin Williams plays depressed and repressed, burdened by secrets, a man incapable of connecting. Williams invests himself in the role of a closeted Nashville bank manager married to a woman for whom he feels only sexless affection. Clearly, the actor was moved…
Sometime in the 1980s, Marlon Brando had his face digitized, presumably as a way of leaving just a bit more of himself after his departure from this planet. As we see it in Stevan Riley’s documentary Listen to Me Marlon, that speaking, moving hologram looks like a cross between George…
Jonathan Demme’s rock ‘n’ roll dramedy Ricki and the Flash exists in a wormhole where the last five decades of pop culture are a blur. There’s 66-year-old Meryl Streep, playing a broke singer who ditched her family to dominate the stage with the whiskey growl of Janis Joplin, the jangly…
Jason Segel didn’t tell his book club he’d been cast as novelist David Foster Wallace in James Ponsoldt’s biopic The End of the Tour. “I didn’t want to sound like Fancy Pants McGee,” admits Segel over lunch in Los Angeles. (Especially since the 6-foot-4-inch comedy actor is famous for dropping his…
The Clinton-Lewinsky scandal was a boon to comedy, but the comedians who feasted then look gouty today: A small group of white, male millionaires — one of whom would later confess to having ultiple office affairs, perhaps to distract from sexual-harassment allegations — collectively decided to call Lewinsky, then a 22-year-old…
The bicycle is one of the world’s great inventions: You can use it for transport, exercise, entertainment, and work. And thanks to the silver screen, the bicycle serves yet another purpose – as a character. Bicycles make frequent cameos in Hollywood pictures, saving the day, changing the hero’s life, or propelling…
August is an interesting month for the film industry. Most of the summer blockbusters have come and gone (although Fantastic Four is hoping to make some late noise on August 7), but it’s too early for studios to release anything they want remembered for awards season. It’s also a time…
BoJack Horseman lurched out of the gate last year with a whole lotta animal puns and one uncomplicated thesis: Old sitcoms suck. An aggressively stupid and mawkish show from the late Eighties called Horsin’ Around, about an equine-human hybrid in Cosby sweaters who adopts three adorable orphans, made its star,…
It’s been 32 years since the release of National Lampoon’s Vacation, in which Chevy Chase, as dad Clark Griswold, packed his Griswold clan into what looked like a Country Squire from Hell and sought the family-bonding experienceTM by driving cross-country to a mythical mega-amusement park known as Walley World. If…
How much time would you like to spend in the company of benignly kooky hobbyists? That’s the question to ask before committing to docu-commercial A Lego Brickumentary, a largely genial but frequently wearying feature-length toy ad. The film’s central conceit is sound enough: Lego construction kits “unlock [users’] imagination,” in…
Even if you live in the same city or town your whole life, the place you came from is always a distant country: Old trees are cut down to be replaced, one hopes, by new ones; shops and businesses change ownership or, worse, are torn down; landmarked buildings may stay…
At 53, Tom Cruise is past the retirement age of every James Bond except Roger Moore. Yet his 19-year-old Mission: Impossible series ticks on, counting down the seconds till its next explosion — and Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is determined to unman his cross-Atlantic competition. Forget high-tech gadgets. The older Cruise…
C Is for Clown If you’re coulrophobic, you fear clowns, but if the clowns you fear are red-nosed, frizzy-haired, birthday-party and circusy types, you’ll be okay attending C Is for Clown from Pandanda Players, the troupe that practices Alphabet Shakespeare. For one thing, Pandanda has assured audiences that there will…
Dana Nachman’s Batkid Begins marches in with the mini-movie you’ve already seen. (Unless, as Bruce Wayne suffered in The Dark Knight Rises, you’ve spent months in a hole.) On a November weekday in San Francisco — a.k.a. Gotham-by-the-Bay — 5-year-old cancer survivor Miles Scott rode shotgun in a Lamborghini Batmobile,…
There’s probably only one humanist film that opens with the words, “Merry Christmas Eve, bitch!” accompanied by the proffering of a single sprinkle-dusted doughnut. In Sean Baker’s Tangerine, best friends, transgender women, and prostitutes Sin-Dee and Alexandra (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor) catch up at a doughnut joint on…
Here’s a shocker: In Pixels, his latest, Adam Sandler plays a stunted man-child who turns out to be very, very special. That’s his ecological niche: the Manic Potbellied Dream Dork, or, if you prefer, the fragile Sand-Man. Sandler films have predictable scripts: In two hours or less, he’ll transform from…
At the start of Woody Allen’s campus comedy Irrational Man, caddish professor Abe Lucas (Joaquin Phoenix) drives up to a new school that’s already steeled itself for his arrival. “Of course, my reputation — a reputation — preceded me,” admits Abe. Such defensiveness also applies to his tabloid-attacked director, who…
The opening of Antoine Fuqua’s Southpaw, shot in gritty, grayed-out tones, is a grim harbinger: A fighter getting ready for the ring holds up his meaty paws for the ritualistic wrapping of gauze and tape. His gloves are slipped over the wrappings, and then they’re taped on, too — but…
Long gone are the days when depictions of reporters in movies were reduced to a fedora with a white “Press” card tucked into the bow. We have Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in All the President’s Men and Peter Finch’s epic cry of “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take…
Few networks are as willing to bet on new voices as Comedy Central. The network’s hustling approach to original programming has yielded such breakout hits as Broad City, Inside Amy Schumer, and Key & Peele — some of the freshest and most distinctive shows of the last few years. Just three…
