The PHiXMovie Review: Gripping Thriller ‘Drop’ Builds a Solid Case for Phone-Free Dining
M.V. MoorheadApril 15, 2025
The eephus is an extreme specimen of an off-speed pitch, very slow and very high, designed to throw off the batter’s timing. It’s a fine title for the movie Eephus. Like many elements of young Carson Lund’s disarming, deceptively unhurried baseball comedy, it seems to carry an allegorical resonance. The movie throws off our expectations; it takes its time, and it sails surprisingly high. It’s about a game played one beautiful early fall afternoon in the 1990s...
The PHiXMovie Review: ‘Heart Eyes’ is a Romcom Send-Up with a Bloody Twist
M.V. MoorheadFebruary 7, 2025
Valentine’s Day has had a long and fruitful collaboration with movie horror. Back in 1931, for instance, the Bela Lugosi version of Dracula, arguably the original American horror movie, was nationally released on February 14, as “the story of the strangest passion the world has ever known!” Later came the 1981 slasher movie My Bloody Valentine and its 2009 remake, and the 1982 X-Ray with Barbie Benton (originally titled Be My Valentine, or Else), the 2000 Lover’s Lane and Valentine in 2001. All of these exercises...
The initial scenes of Nickel Boys are somehow both vivid and vague, like one’s own earliest childhood memories. We’re seeing the point of view of Elwood, a bright, impressionable African-American kid in 1960s Florida. The warm imagery and the overheard conversations and broadcasts evoke a potent sense of the remembrance of things past, but also suggest a small child’s grasp of them. Then we see Elwood’s point of view years later as a teenager, when he accepts...
The PHiX‘Flow’ Movie Review: If You See One Animated Latvian Movie This Year, Make it This One
M.V. MoorheadJanuary 10, 2025
One of the more agreeable outcomes at this past weekend’s Golden Globes was Flow winning for Best Animated Feature. As of this writing, it’s still playing here in the Valley, at Pollack Cinemas in Tempe and at AMC Ahwatukee 24. If you see only one Latvian animated movie about a cat this year, make it this one. Directed by young Gints Zilbalodis from a script he wrote with Matiss Kaza, this wordless, dreamlike, almost free-associational...
The PHiX3 Movies Coming to Theaters This Christmas
M.V. MoorheadDecember 24, 2024
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...
The PHiX‘Y2K’ Movie Review: The Scariest Part of the Sci-Fi Thriller is That the Turn of the Millenium Was 24 Years Ago
M.V. MoorheadDecember 11, 2024
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...
The PHiXGladiator II Movie Review: Ridley Scott’s Sword-and-Sandal Sequel Features an All-Star Cast and Plenty of Gore
M.V. MoorheadNovember 25, 2024
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,...
The PHiXFriday Flicks April 3: “Sonic the Hedgehog,” “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” & Focus Features Movie Mondays
M.V. MoorheadApril 3, 2020
At West Wind Glendale Drive-In: Sonic the Hedgehog—At this writing, it is still possible to go out to the movies here in the Valley, if you really want it; the West Wind Drive-In on 55th Avenue in Glendale is still open for business. Even though some of the fonder memories of my childhood and youth involve seeing stuff like The Valley of Gwangi and Food of the Gods and The Giant Spider Invasion and Horror Hospital and The Concrete Jungle at drive-ins back in my beloved...
The PHiXFriday Flicks March 27: “Emma”
M.V. MoorheadMarch 27, 2020
On VOD: Emma—This adaptation of the Jane Austen classic was released to the multiplexes in mid-February, and then to on-demand services when the theaters were closed in response to the current pandemic. It’s an idyllic deadpan comedy that might pass two hours of “shelter in place” quite agreeably. Austen’s “handsome, clever and rich” title heroine fancies herself a superb matchmaker, and amuses herself with meddling in the engagements of others. Most recklessly, she encourages her...
This week at FilmBar, Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Chandler and Harkins Tempe Marketplace: Extra Ordinary—The adorable Maeve Higgins is Rose, a driving instructor who used to be a psychically talented investigator and exorcist. She meets Martin Martin (Barry Ward), who is still haunted by helpful reminders from the ghost of his naggy wife. Initially posing, unconvincingly, as a driving student, Martin persuades Rose, very reluctantly, to come out of psychic retirement, partly because she’s a lonely...