It’s a weird miracle that Johnny Cash and his primitive twosome banged out music that still feels so full and vital today. And it’s a weird miracle that My Father and the Man in Black is itself full and vital, despite throwing off all sorts of vanity-project warning signs: It’s…
We’ll always have Iron Man, they must be telling each other in Hollywood. As summer wanes, the hulking corpses of would-be blockbusters litter the home-video distribution channels like fallen Kaiju from Guillermo Del Toro’s giant-‘bots-vs.-giant-beasts movie Pacific Rim, the most enjoyable of 2013’s many urban-renewing summer blockbusters. In Del Toro’s…
Understandably, Peter Mayhew is not as well-known as Harrison Ford or Mark Hamill. But W. Ryan Ziegler wants to change that. The first-time filmmaker is now raising money on Kickstarter for Standing in the Stars: The Peter Mayhew Story, a documentary about the 7-foot-3 actor who played Chewbacca in the…
Summer 2013 was a strong season for that oft-maligned genre, the romantic comedy. Excellent films like The Spectacular Now and Drinking Buddies for the most part avoided rom-com cliches, and reinventions like Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing made timeless story lines seem fresh. Still other on-screen romances were held…
There is a moment of silent incompatibility in Joe Swanberg’s Drinking Buddies that illuminates the entirety of a relationship in a single request. As the lovely, earthy Kate (Olivia Wilde) reclines suggestively on a couch in his tasteful apartment, Chris (Ron Livingston), her gently fussy boyfriend, politely reminds her to…
Richard B. Riddick — Dick to his friends, if he had any — is an intergalactic meathead who’s glowered through three movies, two video games, and a cartoon. He’s both the luckiest and unluckiest man alive: lucky because he’s impossible to kill, unlucky because everyone keeps trying. In the opening,…
In 1953, the Venice Film Festival jury didn’t award its top prize, the Golden Lion. Instead, it made the highly unorthodox decision to award the second-place prize, the Silver Lion, to six films, among them I Vitelloni and Ugetsu. How did I know this? To celebrate the festival’s 70th edition,…
All manner of spoilers below. Nearly anyone with a grievance against America’s dysfunctional prison system can find a scene to illustrate their protest in the first season of Orange Is the New Black Netflix’s women-behind-bars dramedy. Admittedly, the wonkiest or most disheartening issues, like prison privatization or endemic sexual assault,…
The late, great Elmore Leonard advised writers never to open a book with weather. Does a lightning storm count? Recently, I was welcomed to Venice, where I’m just settling in for http://www.labiennale.org/en/Home.html?back=true”>the 2013 edition of the city’s film festival, with a spectacular lightning storm over the Grand Canal. This is…
After Jimmy Savile, Amanda Bynes, Lindsay Lohan, and that Christian puppeteer who wanted to kidnap, kill, and eat little boys, it’s hard not to imagine the children’s entertainment industry as a fount of unimaginable filth and degeneracy. But for those who’d prefer to remember their childhoods happily, Mathew Klickstein offers…
If you’ve been anxiously awaiting to hear who will play Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey in the movie adaptation of the 50 Shades of Grey trilogy, relief came yesterday. As with every highly anticipated casting search, there’s bound to be some disappointed fans. For the record, we’re in that group…
Intricate, intelligent thrillers made specifically for grownups are so rare these days that it’s tempting to award extra points to anyone who even scales an attempt. Tomas Alfredson’s 2011 John le Carré adaptation, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, may have been the last great example of an adult thriller that refused…
The most revealing film ever made about kids and the appeal of violent fantasy isn’t Battle Royale or an adaptation of Lord of the Flies. It’s the shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark that a couple of Mississippi buddies put together over the course of their adolescence. Every…
Your life surges ahead as it is, pretty much, but maybe tinted blue. Maybe everything around you is tilted a bit, and strips of light glow on the wall, like an SUV with its brights on is idling on a ramp facing your window blinds. Your world looks not like…
Like The Wire or Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s oeuvre, Short Term 12 is the kind of film that sounds agonizingly depressing on paper but mesmerizes onscreen. It’s a delicate yet passionate creation, modest in scope but almost overwhelming in its emotional intricacy, ambition, and resonance. Easily one of the best…
Brian De Palma had a good reason for remaking the erotic French thriller Love Crime: He could do it better. “I think it’s very dangerous to remake a classic,” says De Palma. “Leave it alone.” But the 2010 corporate catfight flick about two female frenemies had a framework he loved…
As another summer movie season characterized by cynicism and excess draws to a close, there are few activities less valuable or interesting than complaining about it. The blockbusters arrived, flattened cities, vomited effects, deafened with explosions, made money, didn’t make enough money, pleased populist critics, displeased elitist critics, and finally…
Designer and reality TV star Jillian Harris came to the Valley almost two weeks ago to spice up one homeowner Ricci Rivera’s feline-troubled home, where Harris spent a day creating a cat-friendly corner. We caught up with her to talk about how she got into the design world and how…
We’ve got to be getting close to finally finding out who will take the lead roles in the upcoming Fifty Shades of Grey movie. And with the film set to hit the big screen on August 1, 2014, the rampant casting rumors are getting more and more serious. Most recently,…
If you’re sick of the typical political debate about sequester this and debt ceiling that, join ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination, along with the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, for a showing of AMC’s hit zombie series The Walking Dead on Thursday, August 29, in Tempe. Part…
Since it’s called Austenland, and since it’s a romantic comedy, you probably expect it to open with “It’s a truth universally acknowledged” and to wrap with one lovesick sap madly dashing after another, right up to an airport’s departure gates, even though both presumably have cell phones and could just…
In David Lowery’s sublime new film, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, Bob Muldoon (Casey Affleck), who’s serving 25 to life for armed robbery and wounding a cop during a shootout, frequently puts pencil to parchment and writes love letters to his girlfriend, Ruth (Rooney Mara). Bob’s aching, lovelorn voice can be…
