The Phoenix Film Festival kicks off tonight tonight with an opening gala, which according to Festival will be a great chance to catch a glimpse of “celebrities” including Cuba Gooding Jr. and Sally Kellerman. We’re actually more excited about Phoenix Suns player Grant Hill, who will appear and screen his…
Moon director Duncan Jones’ sophomore feature, Source Code — a pseudo-cerebral, modestly budgeted sci-fi thriller with ambitions more Philip K. Dick-like in scope than the recent Dick adaptation The Adjustment Bureau — is a propulsive ride worth your popcorn dollar, not for its preposterous genre tinkering but for its refreshingly…
There is a great deal of prowling motion in Insidious: a recurring sideways dolly outside an ominous house, a trench-coat-clad cacodemon pacing outside a second-story window. It’s the restless motion of a movie stalking its prey: you, dear viewer. A married couple, Josh and Renai (Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne),…
If you’re one of the many people who have a Stormtrooper helmet, argue on a daily basis about whether or not it’s better that Han shot first, or merely wish that Jar Jar Binks could be erased out of existence with a Brillo pad and bleach, then The People vs…
Pro skateboarders Benny Fairfax, Dennis Busenitz, Pete Eldridge, Lem Villemin and Vince Del Valle dropped into Paradise Valley Skate Park on Friday, to the surprise of about 100 (totally stoked) local skateboarders. The stunt was sponsored by adidas during a cross-country brand and new skate shoe campaign. A group of…
Besides doing fun relationship stuff like arguing about how to discipline our dog, New Times blogger Tyler Hughes and his girlfriend, Jackie Cronin, go to the movies. Tyler: Wow, that was like a steam punk, anime, video game nerd’s wet dream. I think we just saw someone’s wet dream in movie…
This week’s big movie may be found on TV. Arch-independent filmmaker Todd Haynes makes a characteristically sidelong move toward the mainstream with his five-part miniseries Mildred Pierce, which starts this Sunday on HBO. Haynes, the most academic yet mass-culture-minded of U.S. indie directors, began his career in the late Reagan…
Elizabeth Taylor, considered to be one of the greatest American actresses, died this morning at the age of 79. Her film career began when she was 9 years old in There’s One Born Every Minute. She continued acting and was nominated for awards for her performances in Raintree County ,…
Japanese cinema’s been around for more than 100 years, landing it a well-deserved spot as one of the oldest and largest film industries in the world with directing greats Kurosawa Akira, Miyazaki Hayao, and Oshima Nagisa, to name a few. As the country currently works to stabilize, strengthen, and rebuild…
Nothing goes better with a movie than dinner (and perhaps vise versa), which Chow Bella has all figured out.Dinner and a Movie pairs all sorts of films with themed recipes each week.Today features Winter’s Bone, the Oscar nominated drama released this year, starring Jennifer Lawrence and John Hawkes. Chow Bella…
Automorphosis isn’t just a documentary about art cars — it’s a study in interesting people, and their often wacky obsessions. Much of what viewers see in Automorphosis falls in the “stranger than fiction” category — it’s the vision of Filmmaker Harrod Blank (an artist who created a camera-shaped van out…
A gleeful celebration of nonstop doping, Limitless offers up a dim Better Living Through Chemistry fantasy that refuses to rain on its own pill-popping parade. With long, disheveled locks and matching facial scruff, novelist Eddie (Bradley Cooper) struggles with writer’s block until he runs into his ex-brother-in-law, Vernon (Johnny Whitworth)…
Paul, it should be noted up-front, is not the third installment in the so-called Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy featuring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, though there are indeed servings of both. Note the one key missing element: Edgar Wright, who directed and co-wrote with Pegg both the 2004 zom-com…
Last night, representatives from the Phoenix Film Festival gave an audience at the Phoenix Art Museum a sneak peek at a few short films in the Arizona, Animated and Foreign categories. If you didn’t catch them last night, you’ll have a second chance during the festival, March 31 through April…
Zachary Levy met Stan Pleskun when he was filming a network television show. Stan, whose stage name is Stanless Steel, was performing one of his strongman acts — a variety of bending pennies, lifting cars, and crushing steel rods with his bare hands. Stan’s a professional strongman in a post-carnival…
Last night the Phoenix Film Festival announced that it will screen “Starting at the Finish Line: The Coach Buehler Story” for its Opening Night Gala. The film is produced by Phoenix Suns star Grant Hill, who will be in attendance for the gala, along with the film’s director and Coach…
If Jane Eyre is not the greatest of the Great Books with a permanent position on required-reading lists, it may be the most frequently filmed: At least 10 cinematic versions of the story have been made dating back to the dawn of the silent era — more, if you count…
Who said animation should look real? Robert Zemeckis, for one, though as evidenced by Disney’s recent closing of his ImageMovers Digital studio, he increasingly appears to be alone in that sentiment. Mars Needs Moms stands as the potentially final Zemeckis-produced motion-capture effort, and, like The Polar Express, Beowulf, and A…
Exactly the sort of mysterious and almost holy experience you hope to get from documentaries and rarely do, Jeff Malmberg’s Marwencol is something like a homegrown slice of Herzog oddness, complete with true-crime backfill and juicy meta-fictive upshot. It begins with context: In 2000, Mark Hogancamp, an Upstate New York…
Nothing goes better with a movie than dinner (and perhaps vise versa), which Chow Bella has all figured out.Dinner and a Movie pairs all sorts of films with themed recipes each week. And today, they picked I Am Love, starring Tilda Swinton, who falls in love with a chef through,…
In Bourne Ultimatum screenwriter George Nolfi’s directorial debut (an extremely loose adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s 1954 short story “Adjustment Team”), Matt Damon plays David Norris, a Brooklyn-born, bar-fight-prone congressman rocketing to the front of a Senate race apparently on the strength of his charisma and the idealism of his…
Ink still wet on his MIT degree, Matt Franklin (Topher Grace) is back in hometown Los Angeles, waiting for his future to clarify itself while he loiters behind the counter at Suncoast Video, hawking VHS copies of Harry and the Hendersons because it’s, like, totally 1988. Inspiration comes when Matt…
