Did you know that there’s a new family-audience feature film that implies God nuked Japan because one plucky American moppet dared to dream? That’s no exaggeration. In the summer of 1945, the kid stands on a California dock, points his fingers magician-style out at the Pacific horizon, and screams a…
No one likes the idea of growing older, and anyone who claims as much is lying, either to you or to herself. The anxiety of aging actors is particularly acute, not necessarily because they feel the passage of time intensely, but because, having the privilege of watching their faces change…
Reviews and discussion of Ex Machina, Dior and I, Clouds of Sils Maria, The Longest Ride, and About Elly are all on this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, which includes Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice, and Amy Nicholson of the LA Weekly…
There’s not quite as much desert and dancing as you might expect in Desert Dancer, an earnest and occasionally hokey drama about kids wanting to hoof it in a world that forbids all hoofin’. Since it’s a based-on-a-true-story job, and since the killjoys this time are the Iranian government, much…
It may be hard to remember now, but there once was a time when Daenerys was the most exciting character on Game of Thrones. Played by Emilia Clarke, the exiled royal best embodied the HBO drama’s paradoxical appeal: its mix of historical authenticity and rousing fantasy. Reduced to currency by…
The sequence that opens True Story tells you plenty about what you’re in for: A rumpled teddy bear drifts down from our vantage point like a puffy brown snowflake, landing with slow-motion deliberateness on the form of a PJ-clad toddler curled up in a suitcase, seemingly asleep. She’s like an…
Truth in film takes another jolly beating in Disneynature’s Monkey Kingdom, a documentary-like nature flick with the last-century chutzpah to pass off its marvelous footage of some months in the life of a single-mom macaque as a full-fledged princess story, with three acts, a tearful exile, and her ascent, in…
Furious 7 and While We’re Young are two very different movies — one’s all synchronized driving and explosions, the other’s all sorta-depressed New Yorkers who don’t drive — but both receive generally positive reviews from Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice, and Amy Nicholson of LA Weekly,…
It’s hard to imagine how difficult it is to make a movie about mental illness, let alone how challenging it is to make that movie. It takes sensitivity, courage, and a great deal of accuracy at the very least to make the film believable, endearing, and relatable to the audience…
In 1848, Euphemia Gray, a bright and pretty young girl from a family of modest means, left her home in Scotland to marry her era’s equivalent of an art-world rock star, the imposingly erudite critic John Ruskin. Perhaps as early as her wedding night, Effie knew she’d made a mistake:…
Mad Men has always been, among many other things, about the exit of the old guard and the entrance of the new — and the acceleration of that transition by the mood and the movements of the Sixties. The pilot, set in 1960, finds the Sterling Cooper higher-ups scrambling to…
The screen version of any long-running comic-book superhero inevitably feels thin compared to the richly detailed idea of that hero in the minds of the fans who grew up with it. Five movies in, no Hollywood Spider-Man has yet embodied, all at once, the comic iteration’s glorious contradictions. He’s the…
When you’re young, to be old — even just the 44 kind of old — is unimaginable. Yet no one who has ever turned 44, or 54 or 74, can tell you how it happened. There’s no single moment of passing to the other side of the looking glass; the…
Victor Levin’s 5 to 7 is a romantic drama about a young writer in Manhattan that could be a superhero flick if its leading man wore tights. It’s as much a triumph of boyish wish fulfillment as Peter Parker swinging on skyscrapers. Brian (Anton Yelchin) is one of those suffering…
“The public really doesn’t listen when they’re being told straightforward facts,” says the Amazing Randi. The magician, escape artist, and tiny lion of principled skepticism, now north of 80, leans forward in a black chair, all knees and elbows and Old Testament beard. If it weren’t for that sharpie’s suit…
Even if you think you don’t know the photographs of Sebastião Salgado, you’ve probably seen them. In one of his most famous pictures, taken in the mid-1980s in Mali, a woman whose face is half-hidden by a dark, rough-textured cotton veil, her bearing as elegant as anything you’d see in…
The Longest Ride is Nicholas Sparks’ most ambitious novel. Instead of one couple, there’s two — and he’s even stretched out of his blond/Southern/Christian comfort zone to make the older pair Jewish. For balance, and for pandering to the powerful conservative audience who made American Sniper a megahit, his young…
Seven Hours in Heaven was poised to be a film audiences could root for at the 2015 Phoenix Film Festival. Except for one, the cast consisted of local actors. It was filmed in Munds Park and Flagstaff. And it was created only a year after co-writers Colleen Hartnett and Kyle…
Tired of traditional, delusional romantic comedies, Liz Manashil took matters into her own hands. Armed with her own experiences, Manashil wrote and directed her first feature-length film Bread and Butter. During the movie’s 2015 Phoenix Film Festival screening, Manashil (known for Just Seen It) described it as a “healthy romantic…
A little romance, some drama, big laughs, car chases, cowboys, and more make up this month’s lineup of must-see films in the Phoenix area…
This year marks the first time that the Arizona Student Film Festival was featured as part of the Phoenix Film Festival, putting up-and-coming filmmakers right next to the professional entrants. The students did not disappoint. With about 13 of the filmmakers in the audience during the March 28 screening, the…
Noah Baumbach has always had a dash of hypochondria, but in the past few years, his doctor’s visits have changed. “If you’re a worrier like I am, or Ben,” he says, referring to Ben Stiller, the star of his 2010 movie Greenberg, “you’re used to going, ‘Is this something that…
