The idiot spy comedy Archer came back with a vengeance on Thursday for its second season premiere, which proved to be just as full of raunchy, underhanded humor as fans remember. After thousands of fans flocked to the likes of Facebook and Twitter to plead with FX to renew the…
The film-making crew of Coyote Requiem will be in town this weekend and they want folks, dressed to the Dia de los Muertos nines, to ham it up for the camera. From 4 to 9 p.m. Sunday, a Dia de Los Muertos procession will be recreated in Guadalupe Town Square,…
The Rite is the latest of at least a dozen widely released American movies in half as many years with demonic possession a major plot point. This doesn’t mean the subject is wrung out — its continuing resonance with audiences hasn’t been effaced by secular pop psychology or modernization within…
The Sundance Film Festival, which ends January 30, self-identifies as a “discovery festival,” meaning that it embraces its own legend of being a place where, over the course of a single screening, an unknown can transform into an industry-redefining star — even as that fantasy seems increasingly out of date…
FilmBar owner Kelly Aubey and Programming Director Steve Weiss announced last night that the downtown film venue is delaying its opening for a week — the first show will run the night of February 10 instead of February 3. Weiss says the program schedule has been adjusted — Red Chapel…
The Arizona-based reality show Desert Car Kings debuts tonight on the Discovery Channel. Soon thereafter, you can be in the spotlight when cameras roll in north Phoenix. As was previously reported, the McClure family, who own Desert Valley Auto Parts, will be the main characters in Desert Car Kings. The…
The Social Network and The King’s Speech would first like to thank the academy for a boatload of nominations for the 83rd Academy Awards (live on February 27). Oscar nominees were released this morning by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and it’s looking like a good year…
Ivan Reitman, master of the high-concept, big-budget Hollywood comedy (Ghostbusters, Dave) would seem an unlikely candidate to direct No Strings Attached, an extremely low-concept, low-key romantic comedy of contemporary sexual mores centered on the dating foibles of attractive nerds. Fully devoid of the fantasy contrivance that often sets a Reitman…
Tracking the parallel trajectories of three employees laid off from cushy corporate jobs at the same Boston-based manufacturing conglomerate, The Company Men is transparent in its ambition to capture The Way We Live Now from a sensitive, equitable — rather than a withering and satiric — point of view. Writer/director…
Any film student in America would probably love to go to the Cannes International Film Festival. And some can through an internship program. Only 20 students in the United States are chosen for the internship every year — and this year, one of them is from Phoenix.Arizona native Rosemary Gee…
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: I just want to start this off by saying that the only thing I knew about The Green Hornet, besides it’s trailers,…
An hour and a half with Winston Churchill may have been a little intimidating back in the day when he was a leading opposing force to Nazism during WWII, but today you can kick back in a comfy chair with popcorn and a slushy and listen to his story, narrated…
Straight To Hell Returns is one of the films scheduled for FilmBar’s initial run. After months of construction and anticipation, Filmbar owner Kelly Aubey and Programming Director Steve Weiss announce that they’re gearing up to open their downtown Phoenix film joint, complete with digital projection of indie films, comfy seating,…
Only inertia will bring people to Michel Gondry’s 3-D spectacle, The Green Hornet. Opening amid persistent negative buzz in the mid-January dead zone, this long-germinating prospective franchise, based on a character that first saturated the nation’s radio waves in 1939, seems pretty much DOA — although in the absence of…
When the MPAA handed Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine an NC-17 rating this fall, cynics suggested that the so-called “kiss of death” was better publicity for the gently experimental marriage drama than anything famously crafty distributor Harvey Weinstein could buy. When the rating was reversed — downgraded to an R without…
Another Year, the 10th feature-length British soap written and directed by Mike Leigh, concerns a year in the life of Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen), the happiest post-middle-aged married couple in the whole of the London suburbs. Heading into their fifth decade together, Tom and Gerri are healthy…
A little more than two weeks should give you plenty of time to submit a short film for the 15th Annual Arizona State University Art Museum Short Film and Video Festival … given, you have a film to submit. The museum’s festival, held this year on April 23, features a…
Dissolute action-movie star Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff), first seen doing laps in his black Ferrari, has no destination in Somewhere, Sofia Coppola’s mood ring of celebrity lassitude. Coppola’s fourth feature, winner of the Golden Lion at Venice this year, is, at times, similarly aimless and empty. But those who groan…
Sofia Coppola had her 21st birthday party at the Chateau Marmont — a fact she had forgotten until Phil Pavel, the manager of the hotel, reminded her while she was there shooting her new film, Somewhere. It’s the first feature to be granted clearance to shoot extensively inside the rooms…
This week’s New Times print issue, The Year in Music & Film is a look back at Up on the Sun’s Nothing Not New project and the best in local music, as well as a survey of the best films to hit the silver screen in 2010. But what you…
Since we’re a heartbeat away from being sick to death of this month’s crop of Oscar-seeking masterpieces, we’ve decided to cast a quick glance forward to the 2011 films we’re excited to see. We’ve seen some of those below and make no promises for the others, but, as ever, we’re…
Many of my favorite films of the year are still awaiting wider release, so although this top 10 list wraps up my 2010, it can also serve as a guide to your 2011. My number one film, in fact, sneaks into New York just three days before the year ends:…
