A wise man — or, more precisely, a wiseass trucker named Jack Burton — once opined that “it’s all in the reflexes.” Few actors have had better ones than Kurt Russell, who makes a welcome return to theaters this weekend in The Art of the Steal. Having been largely MIA…
If you were to survey people who pay attention to movies — to go door-to-door with a clipboard, a sharpened No. 2 pencil, and a sheaf of forms with the word SURVEY printed in clean block letters across the top, later to be tabulated on a vintage Underwood adding machine…
According to lore, Liberace used to greet the tourists who’d come by bus to gawk at his bejeweled home with the line, “I hope you like it. After all, you paid for it!” Not everyone has to like Rob Thomas’ Veronica Mars, the feature-length incarnation of his much-loved television series,…
As of this writing, the Netflix Instant catalog boasts more than 10,000 titles available for online streaming — a number that, as per the official Netflix rhetoric, seems colossal. But the landscape of this digital paradise may not be quite so idyllic. As classic film enthusiast Jaime Christley reminds us,…
Nerdfighters and anyone else who generally enjoys cool things, get excited. And get ready for your assignment. John Green, the bestselling author behind The Fault in Our Stars and co-founder of the highly followed YouTube channels Vlogbrothers and CrashCourse, and his wife, Sarah Urist Green, a contemporary art curator, have…
With last week’s super-exciting, highly anticipated release of the Sin City 2 trailer, we got to thinking about great antiheroes in film over the years. Certainly Mickey Rourke’s Marv comes to mind, along with most other characters in the film that aren’t just-plain evil, but we’ve found 10 more of…
“I’ve got a certain amount of fame, I’ve got money — I wish I could fuckin’ drive,” 86-year-old Elaine Stritch carps just a breath into Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me, a gift of a documentary celebrating its subject’s brittle brilliance, still-here indomitability, brash comic truth-telling, and principled refusal to wear anything…
(Spoiler alert: The following piece discusses up to the February 16 episode of Looking.)HBO’s Looking has had a tough time winning over its intended fans. Upon its premiere, Gawker’s Rich Juzwiak yawningly summed up the political achievement of creator Michael Lannan’s wonderful half-hour dramedy about three homosexual men in San…
Alain Resnais’s last completed film, Life of Riley (2014), presents a group of aging friends who plan, hope, wish, dream, and scheme after they learn that one of their own is dying. The doomed man, George Riley, never shown onscreen, is enlisted to join an amateur theater production in the…
First, the pleasant surprises. In puffing up the slight, absurd Mr. Peabody and Sherman shorts from Jay Ward’s The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show into an 82-minute 3D save-the-timestream child-distractor, director Rob Minkoff and his many writers have preserved a few of the hallmarks distinguishing the Dada, deadpan, almost primitive original,…
Man, woman, gay, straight, bi: There’s something for everyone in 300: Rise of an Empire, the XXL sequel to the also-larger-than-life Greeks-in-shinguards extravaganza 300. In that picture, directed by Zack Snyder and based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel about the three-day Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C., the Spartans and…
Man, woman, gay, straight, bi: There’s something for everyone in 300: Rise of an Empire, the XXL sequel to the also-larger-than-life Greeks-in-shinguards extravaganza 300. In that picture, directed by Zack Snyder and based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel about the three-day Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C., the Spartans and…
It’s that time of year when everyone in Phoenix has baseball on the brain, but, oddly enough, America’s favorite pastime is also big in an Indian state called Manipur. If you’re like us, you’ve probably never heard of Manipur, let alone know that it’s full of baseball lovers. But that’s…
That Bible miniseries, originally aired on the History Channel, won notoriety by casting an actor who resembles Barack Obama in the crowd-pleasing role of Satan. The producers — Roma Downey, who plays Mary here, and Mark Burnett, who pioneered the watch-skinny-people-suffer genre with Survivor — insisted that this was a…
Last night, the Almost Famous Film Festival, a local nonprofit, presented short films made by 20 different teams. The three- to seven-minute shorts ranged from funny and campy to dramatic and suspenseful, showcasing Phoenix-area up-and-coming filmmakers’ skills. While there was a fair amount of out-of-focus shots, corny dialog, and awkward…
It was sad — Jay Leno’s 22 years hosting The Tonight Show ended with all the excitement of a guy farting at the mall. We all talked about his joke stealing and his talk-show stealing and how he’d played to the middle, threw away his talent. We were happy to…
The corpse lay crumpled on the conference table, close enough that the studio executive could tug on the red heel of her Louboutins. She’d been lying there unnoticed, or perhaps just ignored, for quite some time. Her wedding veil was tattered and someone had spilled coffee on her white satin…
“Sex films sell, and other stuff doesn’t . . . or at least not nearly as well,” says film preservationist Joe Rubin. Rubin, 24 years old, is one of the creators working Skinaflix, a VOD-style streaming video service he calls “the Netflix of porn.” At Vinegar Syndrome, a separate DVD/Blu-Ray–centric…
When we first meet the hero of Son of God, a kind of chintzy melodrama about the horrors of capital punishment, he’s approaching a fisherman with a classic boiler-room pitch: “Just give me an hour, and I will give you a whole new life,” Jesus (Diogo Morgado) promises Peter (Darwin…
When filmmaker Thomas Morgan first heard Pushpa Basnet’s story, he didn’t believe it. That’s because Basnet’s grassroots aid organization houses and educates children in Nepal who would otherwise be stuck in prison with their parents while they served their sentence. He thought he must’ve misheard her. He thought, surely, children…
Claude Lanzmann built Shoah, his nine-hour 1985 Holocaust documentary, from over 350 hours of footage — interviews, staged scenes, silent European landscapes as seen from a passing train, their secrets reborn in tender shades of green. One interview, with the only surviving former chairman of a Czech ghetto’s Nazi-appointed Jewish…
It doesn’t feature iPhones, Twitter, or an Internet, and yet Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop remains perhaps the most prescient sci-fi effort of the past 30 years — a work from 1987 whose continuing relevance is matched by the fact that no one would dare make it today. Or, at least, remake…
