It had to happen: There’s so much voiceover narration in today’s movies, so much needless verbal play-by-play, that it was only a matter of time before somebody made a picture narrated by that life of the party himself, Death. The Grim Reaper delivers the opening monologue of The Book Thief,…
From the mid-1990s to somewhere around 2006, Hollywood bankrolled a number of romantic entertainments targeted to — though not made exclusively for — black audiences. Pictures like Love Jones, Brown Sugar, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, and Something New provided a showcase for actors of color, a refreshing change…
Hey geeks, did you happen to catch Thor 2: The Dark World this past weekend? If not, you were one of the few who didn’t, considering that Marvel’s latest entry into its cinematic universe raked in an estimated $86 million during its debut weekend. But if you did, however, you…
With summer and its blockbusters behind us, here are five films worth heading to the theater to see this month. Kill Your Darlings Sex, intrigue, Beat poets, Harry Potter — Kill Your Darlings just happens to contain some of our all-time favorite things. Director John Krokidas brings to the cinema…
Among the Avengers, Thor should reign supreme. Sure, Captain America is the de facto leader, but even he — like the others — is just a jacked-up human. Thor is a god. Or if not quite a god, as he demurs, he’s the next best thing: a flying titan with…
Richard Curtis has so much to tell us about life. Seize the day! Show people you love them before it’s too late! Don’t let the right one get away! His movies — those he writes, directs, or both — are so packed with info-feeling that they become restless jumbles of…
How is it that no one had yet made the Lucien Carr-David Kammerer murder story into a movie? It’s an irresistible tall tale from the Beat back catalog — how, once upon a time in the mid-’40s, the finger-snapping legends-to-be (Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs) all coalesced around the radiant rebel Carr…
Besides its cast, a parade of Brit aces the likes of which we haven’t seen since the last episode of Wizard Boy Has a Sad, the quality that most distinguishes Mike Newell’s adaptation of the best-titled of all English novels is its healthy fullness. In the decades since David Lean’s…
She was a lonely princess. He was a cocky civilian. And after she escaped the palace, the unlikely couple fell in love. It’s the plot of Roman Holiday and — according to this soapy romance from director Oliver Hirschbiegel — the true-enough story of the last two years of Princess…
Here’s how disastrous the MPAA rating system has become. How I Live Now, Kevin Macdonald’s stellar adaptation of Meg Rosoff’s uncommonly smart and insightful near-future young adult novel, has won an R rating. The film is apocalyptic in the most literal sense, as in, an apocalypse occurs, harrowing the characters…
While guest-hosting a TV variety show in 1964, Dean Martin ridiculed a hot new rock ‘n’ roll act with his trademark blend of cocksure innuendo, aw-shucks buffoonery, and inebriated syntax: “Now, something for the youngsters — five singing boys from England. . . . They’re called the Rollin’ Stones. I…
Weight-loss and weight-gain performances are tricky things. Robert De Niro’s heavily mannered turn in Raging Bull just has to be great — he gained 60 pounds for it, didn’t he? For his role in The Machinist, Christian Bale dropped to a sub-skeletal 122 pounds; he looked like a walking, talking…
Photo by Jay Maidment – © 2012 MVLFFLLC. TM &2012 Marvel. All Rights Reserved.Thor: The Dark World just doesn’t compare to the 2011 original, in spite of its few redeeming qualities. That’s the consensus among this paper’s film critics on this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, available now. Listen to…
Phoenix’s only LGBT-focused film festival, Desperado, is coming back to the Paradise Valley Community College in January 2014. Although the film schedule has yet to be announced for the upcoming incarnation, last year featured a mix of locally and nationally made independent films with an eye toward queer issues. Tickets…
Regulars of local English pub George and Dragon may have spotted a familiar face if they happened to catch the Halloween episode of The Price Is Right last week. (If they were playing hooky from work that particular morning, that is.) Namely, they saw the pub’s always jovial owner David…
Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto in Dallas Buyers Club.On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, our critics discuss the upcoming Dallas Buyers Club, the late Lou Reed, 1983’s Get Crazy, 1979’s The Visitor, and 2008’s In Bruges.Matthew McConaughey extends his streak of taking on challenging roles in Dallas Buyers Club…
One of the tragedies of the Internet age is that sometimes movies get attention for all the wrong reasons. When Abdellatif Kechiche debuted Blue Is the Warmest Color in Cannes in May, the festival jury was so taken with the film and its two lead performances that it split the…
Attention, children! Thanksgiving will soon be upon us, and unless the cook in your household provides a vegetarian option, that means turkey — a bird that has been raised to be axed, packaged, and raced to your grocer’s freezer, ultimately to wing its way onto your family’s table. There it…
Recently, Anne Washburn’s astonishing Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play, wrapped up a sold-out run at Playwrights Horizons in New York. I saw the show’s world première in June 2012 at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, where I write about theater. It was one of the most imaginative and unpredictable…
It’s a dumbfounding irony that the fiction of the “entitled, selfish millennial” was invented by Baby Boomers. The generation that created Saturday Night Live and National Lampoon grew up to be weirdly deaf to irony and probably won’t even get what a damning metaphor Last Vegas accidentally turns out to…
It’s almost a relief that Ender’s Game turned out to be a glum bore onscreen, a far-future cadets-in-space military drama whose pretensions to moral inquiry boil down to the guilt a kid may feel after stepping on an anthill. If the film had turned out grand, like the best of…
Prescott may not be a large town, but it made big news when a local mural became the impetus for a national discussion about the intersection of race and public art in Small Town USA. Though the original conflict erupted three years ago, public art in Prescott is still feeling…
