If the Saw series taught us anything, it’s that every quasi-inventive genre movie is fated to become a yearly franchise with increasingly diminishing returns. The Purge practically cried out for this treatment from its premise alone: James DeMonaco’s film had a big idea — a near-future in which “any and…
A defiantly R-rated farce seemingly commissioned to plug the We’re the Millers-shaped hole in the summer lineup, Sex Tape is warmer and more amusing than its ads would lead one to believe. In fact, it’s almost good enough, leaning a little too hard on the innate likability of stars Cameron…
Land Ho! is a How Grandpa Got His Groove Back for the geezer set, a buddy road trip through Iceland, starring two divorced men with a combined age of 150 years. The writer-directors, Martha Stephens and Aaron Katz, are 30 and 34, respectively, young enough to be their leading men’s…
Don’t let crowd-funding leave a sour taste in your mouth. Despite recent news that one man’s quest to make potato salad raised over $40,000, one film out of Phoenix called Broken Leg might just change your mind about the whole issue. Director Kieran Thompson talked with Jackalope Ranch about Kickstarter,…
It seems that right now all eyes are on The View. Well, more eyes than normal. That’s because with Jenny McCarthy and Sherri Shepherd having recently left their spots at the table, the only remaining host from last season is Whoopi Goldberg. And while on Thursday, June 10, it was…
On this week’s Voice Film Club episode, film critics Alan Scherstuhl, Amy Nicholson and Stephanie Zacharek recommend seeing Matt Reeves’ Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (12:00) and Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (20:00), a movie filmed over 12 years with the same cast…
“It’s the secret films you have to watch out for,” jokes Richard Linklater of his new movie Boyhood, a furtive experiment that he kept quiet for more than a decade. In 2002, he chose a first-grader named Eller Coltrane, the 6-year-old son of two Texas artists; cast Patricia Arquette and…
How has there not already been a Nicolas Cage movie called Rage? That title could fit many of the Drive Angry star’s late-career time-wasters. Here it works best as an imperative rather than an announcement of theme: You may feel some anger if you pay to watch this. Or you…
The business of childhood is the business of waiting: waiting for Christmas, waiting for school to let out, waiting to be old enough to stay up past nine. No other movie I can think of better captures the wistfulness of those days full of waiting than Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, an…
Sirens blare and an eerie voice announces that it’s best to remain indoors if you don’t plan to participate. While others make safety arrangements, and some sharpen their knives, one man loads his black, steel-armored car with plenty of guns and begins cruising. Fires erupt along the street, and gunshots…
Lights. Camera. Arizona. Phoenix-based production company Running Wild Films is currently in the casting process for its sixth feature film, Durant’s Never Closes. And while Running Wild founders Gus Edwards and Travis Mills have already cast Tom Sizemore (Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down, Natural Born Killers) for the lead…
On this week’s Voice Film Club episode, film critics Alan Scherstuhl, Amy Nicholson and Stephanie Zacharek race through the latest (and the most terrible) Transformers movie (2:01), Earth to Echo (13:14), and Tammy (16:30)…
It’s a relief, after the wretched Identity Thief, to see movies whose makers love Melissa McCarthy as much as audiences do. Identity Thief’s comic centerpiece was predicated on the idea that McCarthy having sex is a hilarious gross-out, like she’s the pie Jason Biggs once had to diddle. Half an…
Horror, like porno, can be judged only by its effect on your pulse. If you jerked in your seat, it served its function. Biology requires us to react to jump scares, just it urges a lonely man to thrill to a great set of tits. But triggering a coronary reaction…
Who knows why, but the sight of apes sitting tall and proud on horseback is stirring in a primal way. That’s one of the best images in Matt Reeves’ Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the sequel to 2011’s enormously successful Rise of the Planet of the Apes (directed…
Plays adapted into movies always feel naked by the time they make it to the screen, their theatrical bones showing through in a most awkward and unbecoming way. That’s more or less true of Roman Polanski’s screen version of David Ives’ Venus in Fur, in which a playwright and first-time…
So far onscreen, Mexican narcoculture has generated mostly grim documentaries, but given the carnage and the proximity, you easily can imagine the movies coming from both sides of the border: the mezzobrow hand-wringers, the trigger-joy gangster trips, the based-on-true-story crusades. What we might not have seen coming is something like…
Right about now is a great time to saddle up the couch, turn the fan on, and watch some movies. As comedy fans, we remember often being sad about summer because, at one point, Saturday Night Live was actually funny on a consistent basis. When SNL would stop airing new…
It’s time for things to get a little trippy this summer in the movie theatre. From monkeys taking over the earth to a new joint by cult favorite Alejandro Jodorowsky, there’s a lot of weird stuff to see this month at movie houses all over the Valley that will, like,…
Better set your DVRs, biker boys and girls. Because A&E’s History Channel is taking an in-depth look at one of Arizona’s lesser known subcultures. Biker Battleground Phoenix is new reality show that sets out to document the competitive world of custom bike building in the very state known for producing…
On this week’s episode of the Voice Film Club podcast, Voice film critics Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek, along with L.A. Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson, discuss rom-com Begin Again (2:26), starring the always-interesting Mark Ruffalo. They also talk about the biting rom-com parody They Came Together (15:47), which might…
Believe it or not, during Transformers: Age of Extinction, Michael Bay’s fourth rattling of the toy box, I felt one moment of near transcendence. Three-fourths of the way through the punishing 165-minute runtime — and 15 minutes after my seatmate took off her 3-D glasses in exhaustion — my brain…
