In terms of looks, charisma, and talent, Rashida Jones should have been a star a long time ago. But in terms of what she’s ready to offer Hollywood (and what Hollywood finally might be ready to let her accomplish), her belated ascent seems well-timed. Bittersweet breakup comedy Celeste and Jesse…
In anticipation of the remake of the 1976 girl-group melodrama Sparkle — Whitney Houston’s posthumous film appearance and her return to movies after a 15-year absence — we look back at the handful of celluloid performances by the woman once known as ” the Voice.” Houston’s pipes certainly get a…
“My son is sick right now, covered in zits. It’s not contagious — I mean, it’s contagious, but don’t worry: Grownups don’t catch it. It’s called mouth-foot-and-butt disease or something.” Julie Delpy materializes on the patio of Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont on a wave of nervous energy. Hair pinned up away…
“It’s a hard world to be different in,” says Cindy Green (Jennifer Garner) to her Pinterest/vision-board child Timothy (CJ Adams) while trying to explain why he must cover up the leaves that sprout on his legs. “Lots of people hate anything that’s different.” That hammer-to-nail, nutshelled life lesson is one…
See also: Ruby Sparks: Finally, the Fantasy Girlfriend Is Fiction See also: Scottsdale International Film Festival Announces 2012 Lineup Sometimes a movie screens for one night only, and other times it shows for weeks, even months. That’s why when it comes to Valley moviegoing, planning ahead is crucial. Planners that…
The Campaign begins with an on-screen quote attributed to Ross Perot: “War has rules. Mud wrestling has rules. Politics has no rules.” The Texas billionaire/private-campaign-financing pioneer dropped this truism not during his historic third-party run for the presidency in 1992, but in the midst of his far less-successful 1996 campaign…
The Bourne films have more than just overstayed their welcome and outlasted the Ludlum books — they’ve been Van Halenized, with an abrupt change of frontman and a resulting dip in personality. The only big-ass popcorn franchise of the past decade not to have been spawned on computers, the series…
Chinese artist, activist, and antagonist Ai Weiwei became a worldwide cause célèbre last April when he was arrested by authorities at the Beijing Airport, detained in an undisclosed location for nearly three months, and released after allegedly confessing to tax evasion. The Sundance-feted documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry concludes shortly…
“I don’t want to give you lessons in self-denial and social responsibility,” an art dealer tells her billionaire boy client in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, by way of refusing to entertain his demand to buy the Rothko Chapel. “Because I don’t believe for a second you’re as crude as you sound.”…
Just because it made loads of money, stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, and features a three-titted mutant doesn’t mean Total Recall isn’t ruggedly individualistic art. Just look at its outsider pedigree: Total Recall was loosely based on a 1966 short story from the flushed mind of Philip K. Dick, produced by the…
It’s one of the most cherished legends of the American indie: A socially retarded ugly duck, despite making no effort to regulate his glaring emotional hang-ups, is discovered as a swan by a clearly out-of-his-league girl who loves him just the way he is. Buffalo ’66 (1999) and Punch-Drunk Love…
Red Lights aspires to be a genre movie of ideas. Like a great number of films dealing with supernatural and extraterrestrial phenomena, it’s a thriller in which suspense depends on keeping both viewer and protagonist teetering, in the face of the unexplained, between rational agnosticism and faithful credulity. By the…
Japan’s Hirokazu Koreeda always has been an astute, patient observer of human behavior, but between 2004’s Nobody Knows — about four kids abandoned by their flaky mother — and his new film, I Wish, his greatest gift as a filmmaker seems to be his capacity to work with children. Koreeda…
See also: Aurora Shooting coverage on our sister publication, Westword Screenings of Warner Brother’s Batman: The Dark Knight Rises continue at theaters around the country while investigators, law enforcement, and the community of Aurora, Colorado attempt to piece together details and motive behind the mass shooting inside a movie theater…
See also: Aurora Shooting coverage on our sister publication, Westword A mass shooting took place last night during a midnight screening of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado. While initial reports stated 14 people had died, authorities have lowered the number to 12, with at least 50…
Christopher Nolan’s ponderous, pontifical action movies are written less as screenplays than as operator’s manuals, guiding an audience through assembling their important themes while scrupulously making sure you don’t miss a thing. This is as true of Inception, with its reams of expositional walk-through, as of Nolan’s superhero saga, now…
In just two feature films, writer/director Joachim Trier has proved to be unparalleled in exposing the foibles and delusions of all the sad young literary men — or of one man in particular. The 20-something character played by Anders Danielsen Lie in Reprise (2006) finds immediate cult success with his…
See also: Breaking Bad Fan-Fiction: The Good, The Bad, and the Are You F#*king High? This Sunday marks the premier of the first half of Breaking Bad’s fifth and final season (yes, they’re splitting the season into two parts, because apparently they want to torture us). Following a rather explosive…
A zealous gumbo of regionalism, magical realism, post-Katrina allegory, myth, and ecological parable, Beasts of the Southern Wild, the southern Louisiana-set debut feature of 29-year-old Benh Zeitlin, rests, often cloyingly, on the tiny shoulders of Quvenzhané Wallis. Her character, Hushpuppy, the film’s 6-year-old (also Wallis’ age during filming) protagonist and…
Grab your bow and arrows and prepare to leave your hot hunting partner/best friend/maybe love behind, Hunger Games fans. We’re heading back the Arena. Lionsgate, the entertainment studio behind the first movie based on the three-part book series, has announced the release dates for the final two installments of the…
See also: Jackalope Ranch film coverage See also: Five Must-See Movies in July After a summer of Blockbusters, the Valley should be more than ready to welcome the lineup of 36 international films set for screening this October at the 12th Annual Scottsdale International Film Festival. The titles of 20…
The season premiere of Breaking Bad is a just five days away, and truthfully, it couldn’t have come sooner. We’ve been crawling the walls since the climax of Season 4, and in the 10 long months between then and now, we’ve engaged in some pretty heinous, borderline creepy activities to…
