A wan comedy about gambling that takes no risks, Stephen Frears’ Lay the Favorite has none of the stinging sordidness of The Grifters, his 1990 movie about chiselers and con artists. That tight, nimble adaptation of Jim Thompson’s high-pulp, strained-through, Greek-tragedy 1963 novel endures as the only other good film…
Everybody’s favorite holiday debacle comedy “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” will be showing during Civic Space Park’s PJ’ s in the Park event Friday, December 7. The Griswolds (who recently reunited for an Old Navy ad) will be shown in all their chaotic glory right after a screening of the Christmas…
An adaptation of George V. Higgins’ 1974 novel Cogan’s Trade, Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly anatomizes a self-policing underground economy of junkies, killers, and administrators to indict a present-day mainstream world — the world into which the film is being released by Harvey Weinstein, heralded by misleadingly generic TV ads…
Could there be a more unsympathetic character in today’s culture than a well-born white male who uses his privilege irresponsibly? A highly improvised fictional exposé in search of the elusive heart and soul of hipster nihilism, The Comedy stars alt-comic superstar Tim Heidecker as Swanson, a trust fund 35-year-old hanging…
Depending on whether you count direct-to-video releases, Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning is either the fourth or sixth film in the low-rent, Panda Express-level Universal Soldier franchise, the descendant of a rip-off of The Terminator. But less money equals less studio oversight, and the directors of low-budget sequels to 20-year-old…
If David Cronenberg and Luc Besson had a mutant baby, it still wouldn’t be able to make a movie quite as hypnotically badass as Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, a fact that might be surprising to those who reasonably assumed that the Jean-Claude Van Damme-and-Dolph Lundgren-headlined franchise had died some…
Part of the renascent body-count action industry, Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning and its mere existence might shock many Americans. “There are four Universal Soldier movies?” those shocked Americans would say. They might also be taken aback by the bracing violence that marks the film from stem to stern: the…
The misadventures of one of America’s favorite futuristic families continue tonight at the ASU Center for Science and the Imagination. Brought to life in the early 1960s, The Jetsons introduced television audiences to a cast of characters immersed in technology of the future. George Jetson supports his family with a…
“Coast Modern” is an independent documentary that spans three generations of modernist architecture along the Pacific Northwest coastline from LA to Vancouver. The film gives history and showcases pioneers of this particular style while taking you directly inside some of these architectural marvels. It also includes interviews with some of…
It’s almost the weekend, which means you’ll have plenty of time to catch up on the shows you diligently recorded, queued, and bookmarked throughout the week. In celebration of the television you’ll be watching (and maybe lying about later), we’re introducing a short series of guilty pleasures on the small…
A stacked-deck theological inquiry filtered through a Titanic-by-way-of-Slumdog Millionaire narrative, Life of Pi manages occasional spiritual wonder through its 3-D visuals but otherwise sinks like a stone. It’s no shock that Ang Lee brings to his high seas adventure graceful and refined aesthetics devoid of any unique signature or pressing…
Early in Hitchcock, Alfred Hitchcock (played by Sir Anthony Hopkins with a sack of fat connecting chin to neck) walks the red carpet at the première of his 1959 chase film, North by Northwest. “You’re 60 years old!” shouts a reporter to the corpulent master of suspense, then nearing his…
Joe Wright’s dust-blowing new adaptation of Anna Karenina faces a towering mountain of precedent: not only the greatest novel by the man Nabokov called “the greatest Russian writer of prose fiction,” but the whole checkered history of Leo Tolstoy at the movies. A visit to Tolstoy’s imdb.com page gives the…
“I can’t think of a more pathetic situation for an actor than to do a film and not connect to it,” Irrfan Khan says. “And I pray to God that I never face that situation.” Khan might not be one of the most prominent stars in Bollywood, especially not when…
We’ve now been able to screen Lourdes Lee Vasquez’ The Immigration Paradox, which premièred in Phoenix in September. Though lengthy and sometimes a bit eye-glazy with legitimate sociohistorical info, the film’s thought-provoking and beautifully shot. Whether it leaves you in hope or despair about the human tendency to exploit one…
It’s almost the weekend, which means you’ll have plenty of time to catch up on the shows you diligently recorded, queued, and bookmarked throughout the week. In celebration of the television you’ll be watching (and maybe lying about later), we’re introducing a short series of guilty pleasures on the small…
Daniel Day-Lewis and Steven Spielberg ably fill the hat. There’s an unfun tendency in American life to fictionalize our national heroes as rigid statue-people who only speak as though they are delivering commencement addresses with a kind of unlovable anti-charisma that would inhibit anyone in real life from becoming a…
The first few minutes of Lincoln play out like a parody of the expectations of Steven Spielberg’s detractors. The Great Emancipator rests like a humble Solomon upon a hard wooden chair, surrounded by freely mixing black and white soldiers of that great war of his. One black soldier dares to…
That the American cinema is deader than Dillinger is a fact no right-thinking observer unwilling to be laughed out of the room would even think of denying today. To do the current round of think-piece writers one better, we will add that not only are the movies dead, but they…
Silver Linings Playbook, which stars Bradley Cooper as a manic-depressive man-child attempting to get his life back together after a breakdown, won the coveted Audience Award at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and subsequently shot to the top of most Oscar prognosticators’ Best Picture short list. The film’s…
Cult animator Don Hertzfeldt’s award winning three short films involving the life and times of stick-figure “Bill” will be shown Saturday, November 24 at Phoenix Center for the Arts. “Everything Will Be OK,” I Am So Proud of You,” and “It’s Such a Beautiful Day” are three separate short films…
After having created 25 short films and two full-length films since its inception in 2010, the folks at local film studio Running Wild Films have set their ambitions high for 2013 with the “52 Shorts in 52 Weeks” project. According to the project’s director/producer, Travis Mills, each of the 52…
