Inject a little culture into your weekly film routine by dropping into FilmBar throughout the month of March for the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema event. The 18th edition of this series of French-only flicks has a lot of great entries, but we know the five films you’d be très stupide…
Sunday night’s Oscars possibly was one of the best in recent times. There were a few what-were-you-thinking dresses (see Jane Fonda, Anne Hathaway, Norah Jones), and Seth MacFarlane managed to offend many, as to be expected. But aside from a few nomination snubs, there weren’t any real award snubs or…
A new film is screening around the Valley for Black History Month featuring a family of strong women persevering in Phoenix. The documentary centers on two of Phoenix’s champions of the black community: Helen K. Mason and her maternal grandmother, Mary Green. See Also: – Sundance 2013: America’s Black Indie…
Good short film anthologies are lovingly culled from disparate sources, so it’s no surprise that the entries in this for-hire horror anthology — in which 25-odd international filmmakers were tapped to provide brief, cheap chillers pegged to a letter of the alphabet — are berserkly inconsistent. What’s unexpected is how…
If Sundance signals the annual launch of American indie cinema’s new product line, the 63-year-old Berlin Film Festival offered the year’s first major look at what the rest of the world has to offer. In addition to the 19-film official competition, there are two even larger “parallel” sections (the Panorama…
Depending on your perspective, Zooey Deschanel is either the cutest, funniest, most adorable little retro-kookster on Earth, or she’s an irritating try-hard with zero comedy chops. The only thing the world seems able to universally agree on is that Deschanel has nice bangs. As such, her sitcom — New Girl,…
Child characters endowed with adult intelligence tend to be disappointing puppets through which authors articulate their own views. But allowing a brilliant fictional child her own voice and agency (not to mention age-appropriate behavior) represents this whole other imaginative leap — riskier, but way more interesting and rewarding if actually…
To celebrate the 85th anniversary of the Oscars, designers at Shutterstock created their own posters for each film nominated for Best Picture. The posters, stylized as Pop Art, draw from the genre’s greats — Keith Haring, Robert Indiana, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein. Looks like the Oscars might…
It’s one of our favorite seasons of the year. No, not spring (that’s our second): Awards Season, and the biggest awards show is upon us. The Academy Awards, aka the Oscars, will air this Sunday, February 24 at 7 p.m. EST on ABC. While this year’s show should prove interesting…
Just in case its screenings of art-house films, funky nightlife events, and voluminous beer selection weren’t enough to cause you to roll into FilmBar after dark, the folks behind the downtown Phoenix indie theatre and culture den have come up with a few more reasons to visit. FilmBar’s proprietors announced…
Roman Coppola Gives Charlie Sheen the 8 1/2 treatment. As he’s questioned by a therapist in the opening scene of the film bearing his name, we see Charles Swan III’s subconscious literally spurt out of his head. It’s visualized as an animated collage largely made up of ladies’ long, disembodied…
Here’s a question you can spit back next time someone complains that our popular culture is depraved: “Then why are our high school witches, vampires, and superheroes so passionate about their abstinence?” That Twilight hunk and Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man have won tween hearts and Hollywood billions by cavalierly refusing to…
Does anyone care about John McClane anymore? That’s not the same as asking whether you want to see A Good Day to Die Hard, the fifth in this series of films with increasingly outlandish action — and increasingly cumbersome titles. The most recent entry — the slick, ridiculous hit, Live…
Abbas Kiarostami is preoccupied with my tape recorder. He wonders whether it’s too far away from where he’s sitting. He makes his translator switch from one side of him to another so that the recorder is between them. After a while, clearly still anxious about it, he picks it up…
Before anything else, here’s how dumb things get in A Good Day for Die Hard, which is being sold as a bang-bang movie sequel so that nobody catches onto its true nature: a black-ops experiment testing the human faculty for discovering coherent patterns in unrelated shards of image. Late in…
If Sundance signals the annual launch of American indie cinema’s new product line, the 63-year-old Berlin Film Festival (February 7-17) offers the year’s first major look at what the rest of the world has to offer. In addition to the 19-film official competition — this year presided over by jury…
Internet assholes are always yelling about what Lena Dunham doesn’t wear on Girls, but let’s talk about something she does. Bros who think everything should be marketed to them never get tired of pointing out that Dunham’s Hannah Horvath seems to be topless more often than not, a point of…
Those who enjoy film director Wes Anderson’s visual style, witty dialouge, and sepia-soaked color schemes — well, they just get it. Some people, actually a lot of people, don’t. There’s very little middle ground on the subject, which is why he might not be a natural choice to direct commercials…
Set in East Germany in 1980, Christian Petzold’s superb Barbara is a transfixing Cold War thriller made even more vivid by its subtle overlay of the golden-era “woman’s picture,” the woman in question being Dr. Barbara Wolff, brilliantly played by Nina Hoss in her fifth film with the writer-director. Yet…
Just a week or so after the Pentagon reversed its ban on allowing female soldiers into combat, here’s another breakthrough, of a sort: The funniest scenes in the confused and shaggy comedy Identity Thief are of Melissa McCarthy and Jason Bateman beating the hell out of each other. McCarthy —…
If Side Effects, an immensely pleasurable thriller centering on psychotropic drugs, really is Steven Soderbergh’s final big-screen film, as the director claims it will be, then he has peaked in the Valley of the Dolls. Scripted by Scott Z. Burns, who also wrote the screenplay for Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011), Side…
To watch Melissa McCarthy as lovable chef Sookie St. James on seven seasons of the Gilmore Girls was to see an actress perfect the art of playing a sidekick. As best friend of the show’s protagonist, Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham), McCarthy dutifully provided comic relief and a shoulder on which…
