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…
Doing everything right in one generation just makes you old-fashioned, even obsolete, in the next. That’s the harsh reality that confronts 40-year-old Liza — played with spirited, sarcastic élan by Tony-winning actress Sutton Foster — when she attempts to re-enter the workforce after a decade and a half of stay-at-home…
You may, like me, have seen all the Fast and Furious movies, and you may, like me, have enjoyed most or many of them. You may also, like me, have a hard time remembering exactly what happened in each film. You needn’t worry. The franchise’s Wikipedia page is filled with…
The Phoenix Film Festival may not yet be a major player in the worldwide film festival scene, but it might only be a matter of time until that is the case. In its 15th year of existence, the festival has once again pulled in an intriguing variety of studio-released fare,…
We’re two films in to the kiddie-dystopia Divergent franchise, and it’s still unclear if the sequel’s director, three screenwriters, eight producers, and especially original novelist Veronica Roth have bothered to double-check a dictionary. Divergent, and now this new sequel Insurgent, tracks the monotone mishaps of Tris (Shailene Woodley), a very…
Clueless rich guy Tom Perkins rightly became the laughingstock of the internet last year after comparing America’s “war on one-percenters” to the Nazi Kristallnacht. However detestably fatuous Perkins is in real life, it must be admitted he’d make a fascinating fictional character, perhaps in a Greek tragedy about a wealthy…
In the action thriller The Gunman, Sean Penn, at age 54, looks neither old nor young. He’s been in training to look this age for a long time. Even as a relative kid, in 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High, his sailor-on-shore-leave mug had a wry, quizzical roughness to it;…
