Tom Hiddleston can pull off extreme looks. In The Avengers, he strutted around in Loki’s two-foot horned helmet. For Midnight in Paris, he finessed F. Scott Fitzgerald’s prim finger waves. And in his latest, Jim Jarmusch’s vampire romance Only Lovers Left Alive, Hiddleston lounges bare-chested in velvet-cuffed robes. The only…
The sexual politics of Nick Cassavetes’ decidedly un-romantic comedy The Other Woman are intriguingly European and, at their core, kind of groovy. Wronged Connecticut wifey-wife Kate (Leslie Mann) seeks out her husband’s mistress, sexy city-slicker and high-powered lawyer Carly (Cameron Diaz), looking to her for answers: Why is my husband…
Since 2002, the year Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man hit theaters, the other Spider-Man, the hero of the actual comic books, has joined the Avengers, revealed his secret identity to the world, and become a highly paid inventor who has engineered, among other marvels, a limitless energy source science has dubbed “Parker…
Sometimes it’s helpful to know certain details about how a film has come together. And sometimes it’s just so much information. Transcendence, the directorial debut of Christopher Nolan’s go-to cinematographer, Wally Pfister, was shot on film rather than digitally, as most big Hollywood movies (and nearly all small ones) are…
When Wally Pfister won an Oscar for Inception, his sixth film with Christopher Nolan, he went home and put the statuette on his mantel. “And then it moved to the corner, and then my office, and then the closet because you go away for a few months, and then it…
It’s been 5 million years since humanity hauled itself from the swamp, and according to Joe director David Gordon Green, we’re devolving back into muck. While the stoners of Green’s Pineapple Express regressed from men to boys after a few puffs of weed, this grimly beautiful drama starring Nicholas Cage…
Time to brush up on your italiano. The Italian Film Festival USA recently added Tempe, Arizona, to its 11-stop schedule. This year marks the 10th edition of the fest, which brings contemporary Italian films stateside to cities including Boulder, Colorado, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Don’t worry; there will be subtitles…
Gillian Robespierre’s Obvious Child isn’t your typical romantic comedy. Jenny Slate stars as Donna Stern, a charmingly foul-mouthed Williamsburg stand-up, whose cheating boyfriend (Paul Briganti) dumps her for another woman. She goes through the typical stages of relationship loss. She gets drunk, leaves him many inebriated messages, finds comfort in…
All eyes were on the Late Show this past week after host David Letterman announced on Thursday, April 3, that he would retire from the late night talk show in 2015. Immediately, the Internet was abuzz with rumors of who would fill the shoes of Letterman, who’s hosted the Late…
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio can’t carry a tune. Yet America’s toughest sheriff sings both the intro and outro to Randy Murray’s documentary The Joe Show. Bordering on funny and sickening, he starts the show with a poor take on “My Way,” made famous by Frank Sinatra. For the finale,…
It’s no surprise that indie documentary For No Good Reason drew a large audience at the Phoenix Film Festival. The star power of Johnny Depp and Ralph Steadman, along with real footage of Hunter S. Thompson and William S. Burroughs, was definitely a contributing factor. Since attendees didn’t get the…
“I’ve interviewed a lot of nasty characters over the years,” says a cheerful Errol Morris over lunch on a bright Los Angeles day. “I’m a connoisseur of bullshit.” He’s sampled some of the finest: Holocaust deniers, murderers swearing their innocence, a beauty queen who claims she only kidnapped and raped…
Any Yanks concerned that the Brits outclass us may find relief in Alan Partridge, an import comedy that at first seems to stand as evidence of some over-there comic superiority. Compared to our broad Ron Burgundys, Steve Coogan’s local broadcast ass Alan Partridge stands as sharp, incisive parody, a desperate,…
The most perfect works of art are those suspended between conception and realization, the ones that seize you up with how great they were gonna be. (Well, those and Busby Berkeley numbers.) Alejandro Jodorowsky’s daft, daring, surrealist, possibly impossible adaptation of Dune, Frank Herbert’s spice-mining science-fiction novel that later proved…
Errol Morris can’t penetrate the man behind Iraq. As its subtitle suggests, one reason Errol Morris’ 2003 documentary The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara proved so resonant is that its subject was partly a proxy for his most notorious professional successor, the decidedly…
The promise of seeing Scarlett Johansson fully nude is probably enough to lure lots of people into Jonathan Glazer’s alien-among-us fantasy Under the Skin, and the vision doesn’t disappoint: Her figure, seen in long shot, is a grand and glowing thing; she has one of those butts shaped, adorably, like…
Trust Me is an indie dark comedy written and directed by Clark Gregg that tells the tale of a Los Angeles underdog and features such well-known actors as Amanda Peet, Sam Rockwell, Felicity Huffman, Allison Janney, Molly Shannon, and even a brief appearance by William H. Macy. Unfortunately for us,…
If you’re going to make a film based on a zany idea, say, a man who wants to have an orgy with his friends’ girlfriends in order to heal from his mother’s recent passing, you’re going to take a lot of care to not make it a gimmick. You’re going…
If you read the synopsis of Louise Archambault’s 2013 French-Canadian drama Gabrielle, then you walk into the movie knowing the experience isn’t going to be easy. The title character, played by Gabrielle Marion-Rivard, is a 22-year-old woman living with Williams Syndrome, a rare genetic disorder characterized by delayed neurological development,…
When we read up on King of Herrings while deciding which films to go see at this year’s Phoenix Film Festival, the peg of a “Tom Waits tips-his-hat-to Woody Allen world” pretty much promised an entertaining, artsy ride into grittiness. However, limiting what King of Herrings does to just those…
Dear people who lack modesty, aspire to be famous, and have no problem living in isolation with a house full of strangers on national television, CBS’ Big Brother is looking for you. The long-running reality series, which is holding casting calls across the country for its upcoming 16th season, is…
The Phoenix Film Festival kicks off a week long of movies and parties tonight with the screening of Steven Knight’s Locke. With Tom Hardy as the lead and only visible actor in the film, which takes place in real time over an hour-and-a-half drive through the U.K., the film has…
