October is here at last—my favorite month, when the weather in Arizona at long last cools down, and monster-movie season heats up. This season, animated monster pictures for kids are quite the thing. There are three to choose from in theaters now: Frankenweenie Tim Burton’s gives the boy-and-his-dog movie a macabre but touching spin in [...]
What happens when the hit man you hire to murder your mother falls in love with your younger sister? That’s the major dramatic question of William Friedkin’s new film Killer Joe, opening this weekend at Camelview. The answer isn’t pretty. Chris (Emile Hirsch), a small-potatoes Texas drug dealer, lives with his mother. His slow-thinking father [...]
Just as it was difficult to discuss 2008’s The Dark Knight out of the shadow of the heartbreaking loss of Heath Ledger, so it’s likely to be difficult, for a while at least, to discuss The Dark Knight Rises out of the context of the horror at the multiplex in Colorado. As it happened, I [...]
Andrew Garfield looks like a spider—a daddy longlegs. That is to say, he looks like a daddy longlegs with the head of a Byronic poet. As the title character in The Amazing Spider-Man, the young actor, who previously made an impression as Eduardo Saverin in The Social Network, commands an inhumanly svelte torso, like a [...]
The newest Disney princess, Merida, loves to ride her horse and shoot arrows, often at the same time. She has wild red curls and a puckish smirk, and she climbs cliffs in a way that I hope the young audience members of Disney/Pixar’s Brave don’t try to imitate. Merida, voiced by Kelly MacDonald, takes after [...]
Source material for film has ranged from, at the prestigious end, masterpieces of world literature and drama and momentous historical events, down the slide to pulp fiction and comic books to, in recent years, old TV shows and video games and even theme park rides. I suppose it was inevitable than sooner or later somebody [...]
If it isn’t already, you may want to make Wednesday your official movie night in June and July. Cinemark Theatres, in conjunction with Warner Bros., hosts a Summer Classics series Wednesday from June 6 to July 25, with shows at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. It’s a diverse batch of movies, all worth seeing, or [...]
The weekend of May 10th through the 13th, I had the pleasure to hang out in one of my favorite towns in the country,Palm Springs, at the 12th annual edition of my favorite film festival in the country: The Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival, at the Camelot Theatres on Baristo. As usual this year’s schedule [...]
To celebrate its 35th birthday, Childsplay, the resident theater company for young people at Tempe Center for the Arts, is once again doing a show that isn’t entirely, well, child’s play. “The Color of Stars” is a mystery/drama set in small-town America during WWII, involving both the suspicion and paranoia of such communities and such [...]
Wild turkeys have been a recurring theme in my life recently. I missed the screening of The Hunger Games, still mopping up at the box office two weeks after its opening, because I was back East. Among other places, I visited a honey farm in West Virginia, where I saw a small flock of the [...]
