The Newsroom: A Hookup Wish List for Season Two

We love everything about The Newsroom, so don’t even start to try to tell us that it’s unrealistic or that the characters are all too witty. The HBO series, created by Aaron Sorkin (Moneyball, The Social Network, and The West Wing), follows the crew of Atlantic Cable News who are…

True Blood: The 10 Best Sex Scenes (NSFW)

There are those who say that Truebies (a.k.a. fans of the HBO series True Blood) only watch the show for its plentiful, raunchy, and often blood-soaked sex scenes. While in plenty of cases that’s not entirely true, no one seems to be complaining about seeing Nordic hottie Alexander Skarsgård, who…

The Attack: After a Bombing, a Masterful Thriller

Since it opens with a suicide bombing in downtown Tel Aviv, and since its mystery plot involves an attempt to track down a sheik whose public expectorations call for the slaughter of Israeli civilians, The Attack is most avowedly “about” terrorism. But that’s a subject, not the subject. The film,…

Augustine Upends Historical Doctor-Patient Sexism

“You use big words to say simple things,” says Augustine, an illiterate kitchen maid, to the esteemed doctor treating her for the distinctly female malady “hysteria.” This would be a show of boilerplate feistiness in most films, but in writer-director Alice Winocour’s Augustine, it stands as a subtler, more complex…

Neil Jordan’s Byzantium Is a Vampiric Swoon

We have the Twilight franchise to thank for the fact that almost no sane adult wants to see another vampire movie, ever. Not that all the Twilight movies were bad. The first, directed by Catherine Hardwicke, hit a teen-dream sweet spot, the point where gothic lit meets the iPod. And…

Despicable Me 2: Reason Enough Not to Give Up on Kids’ Animation

Admit it: Redemption is boring. We think we want characters to “grow” and “change,” but, really, it’s the people around us in real life — people who, say, loudly pick their teeth in restaurants or walk too slowly in public thoroughfares — who need revamping. (We ourselves, of course, need…

Pirates of the Old West: The Lone Ranger Is More Disney Overkill

The great movie Westerns are about honor, dignity, the majesty of the landscape. But they’re also about beautiful men, charismatic, sometimes dangerous-looking demigods like Robert Ryan, James Stewart, Franco Nero, Randolph Scott, and, of course, John Wayne. The Lone Ranger has Armie Hammer and Johnny Depp, the former a long-legged…

Five Must-See Movies This July in Metro Phoenix

Cool it, Phoenix. There are plenty of ways to chill this summer, and moviegoing happens to be one of the most relaxing and cost-effective — not to mention entertaining. Here are five flicks worth the hot car ride to an icy cold local theater. A Band Called Death As the…

Video Blender Mashes Films, Directors at the Phoenix Art Museum on July 5

Experimental-film lovers and indie-flick buffs are sure to get their kooky film fix from Ninja Blend’s Video Blender event at the Phoenix Art Museum. The special one-time Phoenix showing on July’s First Friday will feature shorts from directors Spike Jonze, Jim Jarmusch, and Michel Gondry, along with weird clips, trailers,…

Exploding Actresses Tumblr Is Mind-Blowing (GIFs)

About a week ago, several Facebook friends started linking to Simone Rovellini’s supercut video of exploding Disney princesses. No big whoop, we thought — people dick with animation all the time. Well, Rovellini’s “Exploding Actresses” Tumblr has now been active since June 16, with plenty of classic live-action kapows as…

The Legacy of Grumpy Cat: Five More Meme Movies

At the beginning of the 20th century, when the art of filmmaking was in its infancy, audiences were content to look at moving pictures on a screen. Oncoming trains, bumbling cops, and whatever it was that the butler saw were all considered worthwhile entertainment. As the years went on, there…

20 Buddy Cop Movies Worth Seeing Again

With Friday’s release of The Heat (Sandra Bullock, Melissa McCarthy), another buddy cop movie joins a film library filled with explosions, oddball pairings and broad humor. While the genre’s been compacted into a cliche over the years (especially immediately following its heyday in the late ’80s and early ’90s), and…

White House Down Is the Best Parody Since Team America

Surprising proof that Hollywood still can craft a memorable studio comedy, Roland Emmerich’s White House Down stands as a singular achievement in parody, its auteur’s intentions be damned. It’s not just a pitch-perfect attack on every risible plot point afflicting today’s all-exposition-and-explosions filmmaking, it’s also a mad liberal’s vision of…

The Writer of Dirty Wars on the Dangers of Covert Ops

Last month, in a major policy speech about America’s foreign entanglements, President Obama declared, “This war, like all wars, must end.” But veteran journalist Jeremy Scahill isn’t buying it. In his new documentary and nonfiction book, Dirty Wars, Scahill chronicles the insidious side of America’s covert military ops, which continue…

A Band Called Death: A Beautiful Story of Life, Love, Family

By 1975, many acts had walked through the doors of Don Davis’ Groovesville Productions offices in Detroit. None of them were quite like this, a band of three related-by-blood African-American brothers who played louder, faster, and weirder than anything anyone in the city that gave birth to Motown had ever…

Gideon’s Army: HBO’s Most Illuminating Crime Drama Since The Wire

Among the revelations you’re likely to experience during the course of Gideon’s Army, Dawn Porter’s vital, moving new HBO documentary (premiering July 1) about the struggle of conscience waged by public defenders in the deep South: “Everyone is so young.” Not just the suspects — mostly black and mostly broke…

Disney TV Is Poisoning Your Daughters

I recognize that, even coming from a father of two preteen daughters, that might sound alarmist, so let me elaborate — the Disney Channel and its prime competitor, Nickelodeon’s Teen Nick, are a pox upon our tween nation, corrosive forces that impart more awful messages than any of Disney’s retrograde…