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,…
“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…
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…
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…
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…
Here Comes Honey Boo Boo is going from obnoxious to odoriferous. Last summer, the infamous TLC reality show chronicling the misadventures of the, um, salt-of-the-earth Thompson clan was all up in everyone’s grill. When the so-bad-it’s-good program returns for its new season later this month, however, it’s gonna be all…
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…
Elijah Wood is a Maniac. By Cory Casciato The original Maniac hit theaters in 1980 and quickly became a slasher classic by heralding a new era in on-screen depravity. The grimy, gritty film about a serial killer who scalps women and collects mannequins famously depicted a close-up of a shotgun…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
This Saturday, No Festival Required gets experimental. The local film organization, headed by cinema buff Steve Weiss, will screen The Beautiful Brain: Two Films by Benita Raphan and Ana Voog Saturday, June 29, at Bragg’s Pie Factory…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
If you’ve never seen Sandra Bullock blow a peanut shell out of her nose, and you’d like to, The Heat is your movie. That’s not meant sarcastically: It’s one of the highlights of this often dismal but occasionally inspired comedy from Paul Feig, director of Bridesmaids, which pits Bullock’s hoity-toity…
As a young boy, I had many different plans for when I grew up. As I grew older, I began to realize that not all of them were particularly realistic. My parents refused to cooperate with my plans to become Batman. Star Fleet would probably not exist in my lifetime,…
The Israeli arranged-marriage drama Fill the Void begins as a spy caper. Eighteen-year-old Shira (Hadas Yaron) and her mother (Irit Sheleg) play P.I. at the supermarket, observing a handsome asthmatic with gold-rim glasses and a gawky frame to see if he’s marriage material. Satisfied with the way he reads the…
Terrorizing children in their bedrooms remains the existential concern of the toothy blobs, hams, and pom-pom-furred Wild Things that populate Monsters movies, many of whom look like gummy nothings long stuck to the bottom of Pixar’s junk drawer. Their very lives depend upon coaxing night-screams from human kids, a premise…
