A woman falls in love with her fiancé’s estranged brother. An aging, successful businessman cheats on his wife. These are the plot and subplot, respectively, of Moonstruck, which turns 25 this year. To someone who’d never seen the film, that description might sound more like the basis for a sordid melodrama with a violent, tragic [...]
Despite the title, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a mostly quiet movie, and for quite a while it keeps its emotional distance, too. The central character, Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn), the son of a Manhattan jeweler (Tom Hanks), speaks in a direct, declarative manner, even when, a couple of times, he raises his tone [...]
Phoenix Film Critics Society, of which I am a proud founding member, announced its 2011 Award winners shortly before New Year’s Day. Among those selected were The Artist for Best Picture; its director Michel Hazanavicius as Best Director; its star Jean Dujardin as Best Actress; and its sultry costar Berenice Bejo as Best Supporting Actress. [...]
Opening Dec. 23 at Harkins Valley Art theater in Tempeis Footprints, a mystery tale in which a woman wakes up with amnesia in front Grauman’s Chinese, and searches for her identity on Hollywood Boulevard. The independent film’s editor is a Kyrene Corridor native by the name of Travis Rust, who credits two experiences at Marcos [...]
Once upon a time there was a sleeping dragon… Sounds like the beginning of a fairy tale, but the time was just last weekend, and the place was no farther from the Kyrene Corridor than the Phoenix Zoo. I was there, in the company of my wife and nine-year-old, to tour Zoolights, the annual after-dark [...]
2006’s Happy Feet was a truly crazy movie, a blend of Pixar-style animation, Bollywood musical and a streak of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Set in a world in which penguins sing to connect with their soulmates, the film focused on the unfortunate young Mumbles, unable to carry a tune but endowed with a natural [...]
At the beginning of Martha Marcy May Marlene, the title character—all those names are hers—flees a cult in rural upstate New York. In desperation, she calls her older sister Lucy, who’s had no idea of her whereabouts for the past couple of years. Lucy comes and picks her up, and takes her to the upscale [...]
Maybe it isn’t quite as mythic as getting spotted at the counter at Schwab’s, but Emilie Doering still has a pretty good story about breaking into movie work. The ASU freshman and Marcos de Niza grad literally talked her way from background extra to speaking part in the independent feature The Aum’s Law, now shooting [...]
Authorship of the young-adult novel I Am Number Four is credited to a certain “Pittacus Lore.” If you have a faint suspicion of a pseudonym, bravo to you—the name represents a collaboration between somebody with the barely more probable name of Jobie Hughes, and James Frey of A Million Little Pieces infamy. Assuming that the [...]
For the shortest month in the calendar, we ask a lot of February. It’s devoted to love, and to commemorating our great presidents, and once every few years we ask it to hang around an extra day to keep our calendar stable. It’s when the groundhog tells us how soon spring will get here. And [...]
