The hills of Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills are a barren canvas of straw grass and leafless trees, framed by a winter’s sky. Nothing, it would seem, can grow here — save for fanatical faith. It is on this barren land that a priest known as Papa (Valeriu Andriuta) has…
“They do move in herds,” Sam Neill marvels, purportedly gazing at his director’s miracle dinosaurs but in reality directing his wonderment right into the camera — and right out at us, the viewers whose herdability made such smash successes of Jurassic Parks one and two. (Our failure to turn out…
“Can you speak up a little, man? I dove off a boat yesterday, and I now have an immense amount of water in my ear!” Brady Corbet, 24, is on the phone from the Republic of Panama, where he’s filming a new movie opposite Benicio del Toro and Josh Hutcherson…
For a guy who has spent a lot of time planning how to brutally murder people in the woods, the most shocking thing about Fede Alvarez is his well-adjusted nature. As the co-writer and director of Evil Dead, the new remake of the 1981 gore classic The Evil Dead, Alvarez…
Tattoo Nation documentarian Eric Schwartz isn’t inked himself — “I’m nicknamed ‘The Virgin,’ ” he admits — but when he started photographing tattoo conventions, he stumbled across an untold, half-century history of color and style inextricably linked to California. Unlike the permanent art they’ve created, these tattoo artists and their clients…
By Mad Men’s fifth season, Betty Draper had walked out of our lives, and a much plumper Betty Francis had waddled in. The audience response to this swollen version of a once-slender character: a collective cringe. Suddenly Betty became a joke. In no time, a parody of Ram Jam’s “Black…
Soap operas are more wondrous and ridiculous than you may realize, especially if you’re under the misapprehension that soaps — especially daytime ones — revolve around nothing but steamy affairs, unplanned pregnancies, and Maury-style DNA tests. In fact, we thought the same, until we started watching General Hospital to catch…
Four years ago, on assignment for The Comics Journal, I asked Robert Kirkman a tough question about his Walking Dead comic series, a question that now, after the TV adaptation’s third season finale, is still resonant: Why are all the strong female characters either crazy or dead? His response, from…
Go catch a free bike-themed feature presentation this week at Mitchell Park during the Cycle-In Cinema screenings. Breaking Away, the 1979 classic about putting the sneaker to the pedal and getting super aero, is up for review tonight with Beijing Bicycle playing Thursday night. See Also: – Cycle: April Is…
If you’re a horror film buff or lover of science fiction, The International Horror and Sci-Fi Film Festival is bound to suit your fancy. The festival will be held concurrently with the Phoenix Film Festival next week, April 4 through 11, at Harkins Scottsdale 101. See also: – A Survival…
If real life were like Wrong, Quentin Dupieux’s sweetly unnerving experiment in ambient fucked-uppedness, your phone would ring before you’ve finished this sentence, and the words you haven’t gotten to yet would be read aloud to you by a voice you’ve never heard before. Then, while you’re at lunch someplace,…
Life goes inexorably, chillingly on. The Up series, Michael Apted’s famous calendrical march, presses on now into its eighth episode, with the same dozen or so Brits from across the class spectrum once again interviewed about their lives after the usual seven-year interval. Suddenly, all these pitiable souls, subjected for…
What must Bruce Willis have felt when he discovered that his seven or so minutes of G.I. Joe: Retaliation screen time offer much more agreeable Bruce Willis-ness than the entirety of A Good Day to Die Hard? Or that his cameo, shot two years back and rich with quips and…
Kids born in 1992 can buy beer now, and according to the usual timeline of nostalgia, this means that the fetishization of all things ’90s is already well under way. And though John Dies at the End is assuredly a product of today’s online world, it feels remarkably like the…
Across America this weekend, wives and girlfriends will accompany their fellas to G.I. Joe: Retaliation, as boys-shooting-boys movies are considered movies for everyone, their violent heroism the default American fantasy. How many of those fellas do you think will reciprocate with a trip to The Host, a post–alien-invasion survivalist tale…
The Phoenix Film Festival screens more than 150 feature films, documentaries, and shorts, and sadly, there’s simply no way our eyeballs can be in so many places at once. In an attempt to help you navigate and whittle down your choices from the masses, here’s a list of our Top…
An actress in her 30s — a woman, that is, still playing characters of babymaking age — may have it even tougher than actresses in their 40s and 50s. Unless she is exceedingly glamorous, à la Charlize Theron, she can all too easily get stranded in the land of mom…
In 1988, the fate of Chile and its dictator came down to a ballot as simple as a middle-schooler’s do-you-like-me? note. A referendum offered citizens a simple choice: a “yes” for allowing President Augusto Pinochet to return to office for another eight years, having clung to power since his 1973…
Two sacred texts of the ’50s proto-counterculture have escaped the rapacious machine of cinema adaptation for a half-century. One is J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, which probably only would have worked starring Salinger himself, and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, that ecstatic recount of crossings and recrossings of North…
Here’s a tale that explains everything: A young Philip Roth, trying to shove his teen brain through Ulysses, is struck by a passage about Leopold Bloom’s public masturbation. Watching a girl watching fireworks, Bloom manipulates himself through a hole cut in his trouser pocket, the act gilded with Joycean rhapsodies…
Like the blood that gushes forth from the elevators of the Overlook Hotel, brilliant/ridiculous theories of what Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is really about have for years surged madly and memorably — especially online, where the internet’s dead-ends, blind links, and back-where-you-started arguments just might be another part of the…
Luther (Netflix Link) Golden Globe winner and impossible-handsomeness standard-bearer Idris Elba is Detective Chief Inspector John Luther, a brilliant investigator with a complete inability to detach from the darkness of his work. In the pilot, he investigates chilling psychopath Alice Morgan, played by Ruth Wilson — he knows, but cannot…
