https://www.phoenixmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/imnoangelpic-1080x720.jpg

A great way to kick off 2025 as a moviegoing year is by visiting an earlier year, namely 1933. At 6:30 p.m. Saturday, January 4 only, the Orpheum Theatre screens I’m No Angel, a classic comedy written by and starring Mae West. Directed by Wesley Ruggles, I’m No Angel chronicles the adventures of Tira (West), a “Sister Honky Tonk” who performs with a circus, first as a midway song-and-dance act and later under the big top, sticking her...

https://www.phoenixmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/AdobeStock_571537441-1280x720.jpeg

Here are three of the big movie releases opening on Christmas Day: Babygirl–Nicole Kidman plays Romy, head of some Amazon-like company. She’s married to a sweet theatre director (Antonio Banderas) and they have two daughters and a penthouse and a country house. But she’s unfulfilled in her sex life with the gentle, unadventurous husband, and sneaks off to watch domination porn by herself after they make love. It isn’t all that surprising when she stumbles...

https://www.phoenixmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Y2KPOSTER-1280x720.jpg

The scariest aspect of the sci-fi-horror comedy Y2K, for me, is that it’s a period piece, set on the last day of 1999 and the first day of 2000. Almost twenty-five years ago. When I was 38. Nostalgia has moved into periods when I was already hitting middle age. Directed by Saturday Night Live alumnus Kyle Mooney, from a script he wrote with Evan Winter, the film starts like a standard teen comedy. Nerdy Eli...

https://www.phoenixmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/gladiatorIIposter.jpg

Crazed homicidal baboons.   Many filmmakers might save the crazed homicidal baboons for the climactic stretch of their blood-soaked sword-and-sandal epic. That Ridley Scott serves up the crazed homicidal baboons near the start of Gladiator II, almost like an appetizer course, suggests how much bloody mayhem he still has in store for us. Over the two hours and change that follow, we get copious combat with huge sweaty dudes, one of them mounted on a rhinoceros,...