Steve McQueen’s first two films both star Michael Fassbender, feature virtually interchangeable titles, and are nearly as grueling to watch as they must have been to make. But where Shame might be nearly as excruciating as 2008’s Hunger, it’s a lot less exalted. In Hunger, Fassbender’s imprisoned Irish revolutionary Bobby…
The movies are full of bed-hopping men — think of Humphrey Bogart’s serial flirtations in The Big Sleep (1946), and Richard Roundtree laying his way uptown and down in Shaft (1971). But in Steve McQueen’s Shame, womanizing is not just an outgrowth of the plot — it is the plot…
Although supplying boy’s adventure thrills on the side, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories are remarkable for how they make the process of empirical brainwork, and the resulting discoveries, breathlessly exciting. Each Holmes tale simultaneously unlocks a mystery while deepening the enigma of its hero in a miraculously sustained piece…
Suit up and grab your leg lamp — Mesa’s Royale and Nile theaters are pairing up to host a special holiday screening of A Christmas Story inside The Nile. On Thursday, December 22, escape the holiday party, bring the kids (and maybe some ear muffs, a few lawn chairs and blankets)…
In a high-rise apartment in downtown Minneapolis, Mavis Gary (played by Charlize Theron) — young adult fiction author, divorcee, and aging prom queen — takes a morning swill of Diet Coke and peels off last night’s As-Seen-on-TV, stick-on bra. After a Wii Fit step program in roomy sweats, she checks her…
And then were six. I will admit, the number of contestants on Lifetime’s Project Accessory looks significantly smaller as they are seated next to the runway as host Molly Sims explains the challenge for this week. And surprise! It’s like every other challenge from six weeks prior, make a (fill…
Sometimes it’s a one-night deal, and sometimes they stick around for weeks, so when it comes to seeing an independent film at a local theater, planning ahead is crucial.That’s why we’ve wrangled must-see flicks screening in the Valley this month. Prep your bowl of buttery popcorn and check out our…
Described as a “psychotic prom-queen bitch,” the anti-heroine of Young Adult is a prize part that affords Charlize Theron one of the season’s prize performances — although, to judge from the voting at the New York Film Critics Circle conclave last week, few of my colleagues seem to agree. Perhaps…
Garry Marshall gives you what you came for. “A dollar’s work for a dollar’s pay,” is how Marshall mainstay Hector Elizondo puts it in The Flamingo Kid. Although he started as a TV joke writer alongside Mel Brooks and Woody Allen, this 77-year-old Bronx baby never blossomed into an auteur…
In the arrested-development dramedy Young Adult, actor-comedian Patton Oswalt faces his biggest career challenge to date: holding his own against Oscar-winning starlet Charlize Theron. Reteaming Juno director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody, the film stars Theron as Mavis, a misanthropic, hot mess of a YA-novel ghostwriter who returns to…
I had a revelation last night: Project Accessory is an exceptional show. While the formula remains a mystery, this little reality show has successfully bent, ravaged, and discounted the laws of the universe. It defies natural logic and everything that makes sense, because a show about purses, shoes and jewelry should not…
The first thing you see in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia is a tight close-up of Kirsten Dunst’s face. Behind her, slow as molasses, birds are dropping from the sky. Brueghel’s The Flight of Icarus turns leisurely to ash; a passage from Tristan und Isolde swells on the soundtrack as lightning…
Lars von Trier is not for everyone. You have only to watch von Trier’s violently quirky short film Occupations — featuring von Trier brutally murdering the man talking in the movie theater next to him — to see that he’s wildly passionate about his work, and yeah, a little bit uninhibited. The…
If you caught last month’s Zócalo Public Square in Scottsdale and want a refresher — or missed it and want to see what all the talk was about, tune into C-SPAN tonight at 10 p.m.. The discussion, held in the SMoCA Lounge in October, posed the question “Is Arizona the Front…
Desperately trying to appeal to not just the Gen X’ers who grew up with Kermit, Miss Piggy, and Dr. Teeth, but also the tykes who’ve never even heard of Jim Henson, The Muppets has none of the easy confidence of the original TV show or the 1979 movie. Those Carter-era…
Martin Scorsese’s first foray into big-budget family filmmaking — as well as his inaugural effort in 3-D — Hugo is a personal statement disguised as a sellout. Based on Brian Selznick’s 2007 kids’ book The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Hugo centers on its title character, played by Asa Butterfield, a…
A simple, powerful act of bearing witness, We Were Here is a sober reminder of the not-too-distant past, when gays were focused not on honeymoon plans but on keeping people alive. David Weissman’s oral history of the AIDS crisis in San Francisco also explores the specifics of psychogeography: Vividly recalling…
We get the escapism we deserve, I guess: Just as 1930s Hollywood distracted Depression-era audiences with glitzy Fred and Ginger musicals, Harvey Weinstein is answering our Occupy-preoccupied times by releasing two Oscar hopeful fantasies in the same week. Both present the sad lives of Old Hollywood stars, but the soft…
“The revolution will not be televised.” So Gil Scott-Heron asserted in 1970, and so it was not — at least not on American TV. As demonstrated by The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, however, Swedish television was another story. Black nationalism lives and breathes in this remarkably fresh documentary assembled by…
“I don’t think about the home where my films will land,” says Alexander Payne, free-range in a film culture fenced off into art house and multiplex, to the detriment of both. He describes the audience that he writes for as “my best friends and myself . . . Then your…
It’s time to play the music. It’s time to light the lights. It’s time to meet the Muppets. Again.In Disney’s franchise reboot The Muppets, the perpetually meta monsters attempt a comeback after years out of the spotlight. Meanwhile, the actual behind-the-camera filmmakers (including the picture’s co-writer and leading man Jason Segel) attempt…
Sure, the star of the week is turkey and all its fixin’s. But while folks reunite with their families for their annual Thanksgiving feast, another family of sorts will reunite on the big screen: the fuzzy, funny Muppets. Jason Segel’s reboot The Muppets finds the goofy gang disbanded, with Kermit…
