When Ben Kitnick first hung out at lo-fi art space and weirdo hangout Funny World last year, the ASU film student thought the house-show haven was a fascinating place. So much so that he immediately was struck by the notion that “someone needs to tell a story about this place.”…
Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg) believes life has cheated him. Doesn’t America promise riches and luxury to people who deserve it? He’s worked hard to build his body into a hulking knot of muscles; success should follow. But Lugo (the lead in Michael Bay’s neon-noir ode to Miami, muscle tone, and…
There’s a thin line between what’s truly mysterious and what’s totally bogus. A movie that leaves you feeling unclear about what’s happening isn’t necessarily mysterious — it may just be inept. In other words, the problem may be it, not you. Shane Carruth’s second feature, Upstream Color, a dystopian romance…
Though he’s long been among the most recognizable celebrities in the world, Tom Cruise has always seemed vaguely irritating, like the popular kid at school everybody secretly dislikes. His is an odd sort of fame: Globally recognized but rarely acclaimed, he remains more reliably bankable than nearly any other actor…
In The Client List, Lifetime’s pseudo-steamy take on the world of sensual massage, Jennifer Love Hewitt plays a struggling housewife who takes a rub-down side job in order to support her kids after her husband disappears. The show, which jumps from scenes of Hewitt pleasuring executives to her dancing with…
Perhaps the first great indie apocalypse potluck comedy, Todd Berger’s It’s a Disaster aces many of the fundamentals bobbled by too many of the films with which it shares DNA. Like dopey ol’ Cloverfield, this opens with get-to-know-the-cast party scenes (in this case, a sharply observed and performed couples’ brunch)…
Steve Jobs will be directed by Aaron Sorkin. Jobs stars Ashton Kutcher. But this year’s third Steve Jobs biopic, Funny or Die’s iSteve, has its own advantage: It’s first. As of April 15, audiences were able to watch the hour-plus feature on Funny or Die’s website, while Sorkin continues to…
Picking up a mere seven years after the previous installment, Scary Movie V features no original cast members, no Wayans brothers producing (they bailed after No. 3) and a new director (first-timer Malcolm D. Lee). It’s still terrible. Why, you may ask, does one even bother to review Scary Movie…
Last week, America received two embarrassing reminders of its doting but asexual love for the Nonthreatening Black Man (NTBM). First, professional cowboy-hat-wearer Brad Paisley and Kangol connoisseur LL Cool J unintentionally trolled the entire Internet with “Accidental Racist,” a country song that argues that access to necklaces today totally makes…
A big winner at last year’s SXSW, Gimme the Loot is a pocket-size Bronx indie with the wispiest of narrative ideas: A couple of teen graffiti bombers decide to gain fame by tagging the Mets’ Home Run Apple. Malcolm (Ty Hickson) and Sofia (Tashiana Washington) are mates only in spraying,…
The good news: Here’s a lavish, serious science-fiction picture, one that on occasion transcends big-budget hit-making convention to glance against grandeur. Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion, based on his own graphic novel, is one of those futuristic puzzlers whose dramatic energies are most invested not in the characters or their fates, exactly,…
After working a packed auditorium into a frenzy at last September’s première of Lords of Salem at the Toronto International Film Festival, Rob Zombie anxiously took his seat and watched his audience watch his film, his first independently financed feature. It’s also the first film he’s made following a messy…
Half a year later, now on Blu-ray and DVD, Django Unchained is still kicking up shit, this time via cross-media trickle-down. TV’s LL Cool J, not long before declaring Confederate flag apparel A-okay with him, dared to express in “Accidental Racist” one hard-edged complaint about the life of a black…
If the style of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and the themes in Django: Unchained could be fused together into one movie, it might look something like The Retrieval. Director, writer, and editor Chris Eska made the dark Civil War-era flick and it’s getting buzz all across the country, winning a…
A likable hagiography as nuanced as a plaque at the Cooperstown Hall of Fame, Brian Helgeland’s Jackie Robinson bio 42 finds a politic solution to the challenge Quentin Tarantino faced last year with Django Unchained: How to craft a crowd-pleasing multiplex period piece whose villain is, essentially, “all white people”?…
Here’s the kind of theory that the five interviewees in Rodney Ascher’s Room 237 have come up with about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining: One believes that it’s an allegory about the genocide of Native Americans. Another that it’s instead about the Holocaust. Or that it’s Kubrick’s coded confession that he…
It’s time, apparently, for the aging ghosts of ’60s radicalism to once again take stock of their sins and compromises. In The Big Chill and Running on Empty, during the Reagan ’80s, the then-middle-aged revolutionaries’ to-do list involved holding down careers and worrying about their kids; now the noble fist-wavers…
Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is a film that inspires strong reactions, and people have been trying to pin down what it’s really about almost since the day it was released. With Room 237 first-time feature director Rodney Ascher has gone deeper down the rabbit hole than anyone before him, bringing…
A common sentiment recurs through the abundance of eulogies and obituaries penned by film critics in the wake of his death late last week: Roger Ebert was an inspiration. It’s easy enough to be encouraged by another’s success — to regard an esteemed elder colleague with a combination of admiration…
On Friday, telecommunications media artist Adriene Jenik will screen the latest iteration of SPECFLIC, a multifaceted project she’s been working with since 2005. After taking a position as the director of the ASU School of Art in 2009, Jenik has become quite familiar with the setting of her latest piece…
Everyone copes with tragedy differently. Actor Alev Aydin wrote Lonely Boy after experiencing the effects brain cancer had on his mother, which resulted in symptoms similar to schizophrenia. His film, in which he also plays the lead as Franky, explores the hardship of having that mental illness while trying to…
Although the Phoenix Film Festival is a locally run event, the movies shown feature talent from all over. It was refreshing to see one film that was made by a local, Elise Salomon. Her documentary about L.A.-area indie record label Wild Records and its close-knit group of artists is a…
