Both major releases this week are dinosaur-forward, so as usual I'll start with a disclaimer: Any movie with dinosaurs starts at an advantage with me. Take what I say about any dinosaur movie with a grain of salt.
“That is so cool!” So exclaims our hero Peter Parker/Spider-Man at one point in the Marvel movie Spider-Man: Brand New Day. He’s awestruck at a particularly graceful and impressive maneuver by his enemies. It’s professional respect; superhuman prowess acknowledging superhuman prowess. There are quite a few such magical moments in the film, directed by Destin Daniel Cretton from a script by Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers. Tom Holland is back as Pete/Spidey, whose existence,...
Exciting as this Odyssey is, however, there’s a sadness to it as well, a sense that we're seeing the end of a Golden Age and the beginning of an era of disillusionment brought about through the brutality of war and the flouting of social and civic norms.
In the late 1970s, a young woman I dated a few times in high school once informed me that, should she ever get the opportunity to sleep with Robby Benson, she was taking it. She wasn’t delusional; she recognized the unlikelihood of this, and wasn’t working to bring it about. But she wanted to make it clear that if circumstances ever happened to align and the chance presented itself, it was happening, and any...
The goggled, giggling little goobers who look like ambulatory yellow Tic Tacs are back in Minions & Monsters.
By the standards of big summer blockbusters, this Supergirl is relatively modest in scope, which I found agreeable.
Played by Hugh Jackman, the title character is presented here as a scoundrel, murderous brigand and varlet.
Disclosure Day is a sci-fi epic in the form of a chase thriller.
Tall and imposingly fleshy, Fraser also manages to give us a human Eisenhower.
After the eye-crossing political backstory of the much-lamented Star Wars prequel and sequel trilogies, it was refreshing.
Lest anyone suppose that the title Is God Is denotes a pious devotional picture, be advised: not so much.
The best part of the original 2006 dark comedy The Devil Wears Prada, for me, was the opening title sequence. Snappily edited to KT Tunstall’s “Suddenly I See,” it intercuts impossibly stylish supermodel-type young women beginning their day in New York in contrast to our supposedly frumpy heroine, Andy (Anne Hathaway), as she heads to a job interview. The second-best part was the entrance that director David Frankel gave to the presumable title character, fashion...
Jaafar Jackson plays the title role in the biopic Michael. The real-life son of Michael Jackson’s older brother, Jermaine, he's a bit of a ringer for his famous uncle, and he dances with some of the same inexplicable combination of precision and loose-limbed abandon
The Arizona Science Center took a bold step into the future last fall when it debuted the refurbished Dorrance Planetarium and renamed it the Dorrance DOME.
Around this time every year we ask Phoenix Film Festival executive director Jason Carney the same question: Is there a film you’re particularly excited about this year? And every year, he’s ready with an answer. This year, his pick is the opening night selection – the comedy Power Ballad with Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas. “It was one I really wanted,” Carney says. “I love films about music. It’s so charming. Also, I’m a huge...
