Attention, film buffs: It’s that time of year when Phoenix gets to showcase aspiring filmmakers and everyday Phoenicians can pretend to be a part of the glitterati, rubbing elbows with celebrities, producers, and directors. The 13th Annual Phoenix Film Festival will screen more than 150 feature films, documentaries, and shorts…
Because there’s no use in waiting for the trial to be over or or giving those involved a minute for closure, Lifetime has confirmed that a movie based on the Jodi Arias circus trial is currently in the works. The reported working title: Dirty Little Secret: The Jodi Arias Story…
Bless the girls and guys of Lena Dunham’s HBO television series Girls. Without them, we’d have far less awkward conversations with our boyfriends, mothers, and coworkers and even fewer reasons to talk about the seemingly ever-present boobs of Dunham, who’s the writer, producer, and star of her own show. There…
Elisabeth Moss’s face is far from the only reason to savor Top of the Lake, Jane Campion’s smart, bracing, hugely enjoyable mystery rural noir Top of the Lake, which premieres on the Sundance Channel on Monday, March 18. But that pale-to-radiant instrument of hers—a mouth that suggests her characters might…
Steve Carell’s gift is for men who might drown in their own obliviousness. Like his Daily Show reporter or The Office’s Michael Scott, his 40-year-old virgin lived in terror that someone might catch on to the fact that he knows nothing about subjects he purports to have mastered. When his…
Puberty is sex and sex is murder in Stoker, a Hitchcockian stew of hothouse familial jealousy, sadism, and psychosis all tied together by one teenage girl’s homicidal coming of age. Psychosexual imagery permeates every inch of renowned South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook’s stateside debut. A blood-tipped pencil and water dripping…
Like the yearning Jimmy Van Huesen/Johnny Burke torch song that lends it its title, Abbas Kiarostami’s Like Someone in Love is a sly, teasing riff on the heart’s irrational stirrings. But the film’s true spirit is even better encapsulated by Training a Parrot, an early 20th-century painting by the Japanese…
Unlike many fledgling web series that use broad comedic strokes to up the laughs per second, faux-vlogging gem My Bastard Son combines the naturalistic acting of shows like The Office with absurd circumstances and very specific characters. The grainy, five-minute video shows James Urbaniak (American Splendor) trying to connect with…
Hey, Veronica Mars fans, looks like you’re getting a movie. The teen-noir starring Kristen Bell kicked off in 2004 but was canceled in 2007. Ever since, Bell and creator Rob Thomas promised disappointed fans that they’d try to shoot a movie. Warner Brothers executives (who own rights to the Mars…
Stone-faced and brutal, Lee Marvin defined the role of cinematic “tough guy.” Dwayne Epstein, author of the new biography Lee Marvin: Point Blank, describes the moment he realized Marvin’s role as film’s first “action star” as the “quintessential whack on the back of the head. Some people call it a…
Load up on your snack of choice, pal. You have some movies to see. Here are five flicks and festivals you don’t want to miss this month. The Monk at Harkins Shea In our pope-free world, searching for piousness seems pretty pointless. But slacking on our Hail Marys doesn’t really…
It’s a bad omen when, early on in Oz the Great and Powerful, we learn that the full given name of its wizard is Oscar, also the ceremony that star James Franco once presided over as calamitously as he does this sagging Disney tentpole, a gargantuan attempt to turn L…
“Why is there evil in the world?” That question and its corollaries — Where does evil come from? Why can so many create and commit it with apparent immunity? — are at the core of the film Bless Me, Ultima, whose 7-year-old hero, Antonio, wrestles with riddles that have likely…
Twenty minutes into the first full-length movie based on L. Frank Baum’s most beloved novel, a duck pukes into the face of Larry Semon, the star and director. Semon’s 1925 flop, titled The Wizard of Oz, opens and closes with a Geppetto-esque toymaker reading to his granddaughter from a well-loved…
Have you ever wondered how to run a movie theater? What about where the film and theater industries are headed? Dan Harkins, owner and CEO of the Harkins Theatres chain, will be speaking Wednesday, March 6, at his Valley Art Theatre, on Mill Avenue in Tempe, about just that. See…
To paraphrase Stephen Sondheim, there are big, tall, terrible, fleshy, bulbous-headed giants in the sky in Jack the Giant Slayer. And what would a big-budget, mildly revisionist, 3-D spin on “Jack and the Beanstalk” be if those fearsome beasties didn’t somehow make it down to sea level, where a storybook…
Calling Happy People: A Year in the Taiga a Werner Herzog film is something like calling the dozen books released in 2012 with James Patterson’s name on them “novels written by James Patterson.” It simply isn’t so in the traditional sense, though in this case, the end product isn’t some…
It’s a cliché of the voting world that even the staunchest liberals — especially of the privileged male variety —tend to drift rightward through middle age and beyond. Yesterday’s protesters develop the libertarian malaise; its progressives seek to fence in their fiefdoms and tax-proof their stock portfolios. Not so the…
There’s a reason, beyond basic Judd Apatow oversaturation, that hardly anyone went to see his mewl of middle-aged despair This Is 40. A movie about a marriage already in progress — as opposed to one about a marriage just waiting to happen, the province of the romantic comedy — is…
Honestly, when it started six years ago, Californication was provocative, ballsy, and fun, with laugh-out-loud dialogue and plenty of smart musings about love, sex, family and responsibility. Over five seasons, anti-hero Hank Moody (David Duchovny) has drank and fucked his way through a series of Hollywood writing jobs, all the…
Guy humor is always with us, kind of like the poor. For as long as cavemen have been etching fart jokes into the walls of caves, women have been rolling their eyes, as they didn’t yet have the language tools to whip up outraged essays for Jezebel. Still, given the…
What could be better than catching one your favorite classic films on the big screen while lying on the grass, enjoying the cool breeze, and noshing on good eats? Biltmore Fashion Park brings back its annual Movies in the Park, starting Friday, March 1, at 7:30 p.m. See also: Coffee,…
