Perhaps you’ve lost faith in movies about amusingly digressive criminals. Maybe you believe it’s no longer possible to be pleasurably jolted by inventive swearing, from-no-place head shots, and post-everything structural flourishes. Certainly you have no reason to expect blood-splattered poetry or throat-clearing laughter from yet another movie in which Los…
Perhaps more than any other male American star of his generation, Ben Affleck understands the narrative advantage of having Hollywood on your side. The Good Will Hunting co-screenwriter and co-star won an Oscar at age 25 in large part because he and collaborator Matt Damon, as struggling actors who created…
Next week’s Paranormal Activity 4 continues the story of an extended American family whose members own a lot of surveillance cameras, camcorders, smart phones, baby monitors, webcams, Talkboys, and other consumer electronic devices with which they record the haunting of their nice suburban tract homes by a terrifying demonic entity…
Fred Williamson is more of a man than probably about 90 percent of the males in the world. During his seven-year stint in pro football with such teams as the Oakland Raiders and Kansas City Chiefs, he earned the nickname “The Hammer” for his aggressive, smashmouth style of play. Plus,…
If you’ve been yawning at Hollywood’s latest offerings of sequels and remakes and feeling a bit like “they don’t make ’em like they used to,” Biltmore Fashion Park may have the remedy for your movie-going blues. See Also: – Seven Favorite Spots to Catch a Movie in Phoenix – Five…
Ever since Mars Attacks!, Tim Burton mostly has been in the adaptation business, rendering dark and becurlicued Sleepy Hollows, Alice in Wonderlands, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factorys. With Frankenweenie, he adapts his own work — the first animated short he ever produced for a major film studio, and the…
“Positive characterizations are complex characterizations,” says writer-director Ava DuVernay, tucking into a serving of roasted potatoes. “That’s all we need to know. They shouldn’t be saccharine. They shouldn’t feel like medicine. You know, often films that are deemed positive, nobody wants to see them.” It’s a recent Sunday afternoon, and…
In Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths, a prune-faced, simian-mouthed sexagenarian sits by the road in an old suit and brown-patterned tie, and cradles a white bunny in his arms. This is precisely what we’ve come to expect of a Tom Waits entrance. Waits has long been one of Hollywood’s favorite sight…
The 2012 Presidential Debates are coming, the first of which is this Wednesday night, reminding us there’s no hope left for our country. Mitt Romney is telling us to “Believe in America,” which is not a bad idea. It’s similar to Stalin telling folks to “believe in Mother Russia.” Hey,…
The Vampires vs. Werewolves argument will likely continue — especially between their die-hard tween (and tween mom) fans — well beyond the end of the Twilight series. But for the fans who need a fix and a good dose of Team Kristen shenanigans, there’s Harkins’ Twi-mania. The day-long screening of…
The way films come and go, in and out of theaters, usually it’s easier to miss a movie than catch it. That makes planning ahead a must when it comes to moviegoing in the Valley. That’s also why we’ve handpicked five must-see flicks screening this month to add to the…
“We want to get it out to as many folks as we can before the elections take place,” says Bryan Vasquez of The Immigration Paradox, a new full-length documentary by Lourdes Lee Vasquez. Speaking of paradoxes, that explains why a film you’ve probably never heard of is having its world…
It’s difficult to choose this fall’s must-watch roster, since there’s so much happening — lots of it good, lots less so. In its dismal Friday night slot, the still-brilliant Fringe will embark on its final season, highly recommended for X-Files fans, JJ Abrams followers, and those wanting to gawk at…
Early on in Rian Johnson’s time-travel thriller Looper, Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) sits at a diner and chats with his self from 30 years in the future (Bruce Willis). When the younger Joe asks the older one about the specifics of temporal displacement, the latter dismisses the question, telling his interlocutor…
Casting a tapered, vase-slender silhouette and speaking in a Transylvanian accent with a touch of Borscht Belt, Hotel Transylvania’s de-fanged Count Dracula is introduced in an 1895-set prologue while serenading his infant daughter. No menacing carnivore, this Nosferatu has sworn off fatty human blood, is more scared of humans than…
17 Girls (17 Filles), set in the small, depressed, French seaside town of Lorient, makes a big deal about having been inspired by a true story that took place in the small, depressed, American seaside town of Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 2008: Eighteen high school girls all turned up pregnant at…
“I hate realism,” director Genndy Tartakovsky says. “In America, especially, we’re very narrow-minded as far as animation goes. There is only one kind of movie, and that’s that big, family-oriented, four-quadrant, please-everyone kind of film. But if I wanted realism, I’d watch a live-action movie. Those lines are being blurred…
Those were trying times for Rome. Nero, the last of the Julio-Claudian Caesars and a big spender with a reputedly homicidal temper, was on the throne. Stories abound of how he attempted to poison his mother, kicked one of his wives to death, and personally ordered the upside-down crucifixion of…
“Death wasn’t being responded to as a public health problem,” David France says. “It was dealt with with sniggers. It was left to religious leaders to explain or respond to the epidemic. And they responded by calling it the wrath of God.” He adds: “That’s the hostility we all saw…
Here comes the finale of the show everyone loves to hate (and hates to love). Tonight, Honey Boo Boo Child Alana Thompson, along with her Mama June, Sugar Bear, and sisters will likely shock, confuse, and disgust an audience of millions that love/hates the reality show, which follows the Thompson…
After a nationally televised improv exercise that, for better or worse, offered more unvarnished reality than anything else at this year’s political conventions, Clint Eastwood returns in his first on-screen role in four years with Trouble With the Curve. The “empty chair” jokes practically make themselves. There is a scene…
Typically, the creators of comic-book adaptations assume that ingratiating themselves with anyone unfamiliar with their characters/properties demands boilerplate origin stories where protagonists exhaustively declare who they are in no uncertain terms. This is, thankfully, not true of Dredd, whose creators have the confidence to treat their narrative like just another…
