It just don’t get any better than a Jumbo Jack and a paw clap with the little Sun who could — Brazilian blur Barbosa, by most accounts the fastest man in the NBA. Leandro’ll be at the fast-food joint signing autographs and promoting the upcoming Jack in the Box Celebrity…
A great brooding thundercloud of a movie, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood arrives as if from nowhere on a gust of critical acclaim, lowering over a landscape of barren mesas and hot, scrubby hills. Anderson’s epic, no less than his career, is both fearfully grandiose and wonderfully eccentric…
“You don’t meet the book when you meet the writer,” the novelist William Gibson has said. “You meet the place where it lives.” A relatively uncontroversial remark about the people who vent their imaginations on the page — no one should expect Philip Roth to sound exactly like Nathan Zuckerman…
Pajama Game: Word from Tucson, where Arizona Theatre Company debuted this recently revived Broadway favorite last month, is that the company has come up with another winner. With direction by ATC artistic director David Ira Goldstein, and a return from New York by local favorite (and former Phoenix native) Bob…
It’s that time of year again. Our six critics don’t always (or often) agree, but we’ve combined their top 10 lists (allowing for ties) to pretend that they do! So without further ado, the 10 (or 15) best movies of the year, kind of: 1. There Will Be Blood The…
How tough is it for a movie to find its audience, above the din of blockbuster marketing and beyond the clogged distribution pipeline? Tsai Ming-liang, the Taiwanese/Malaysian director regarded as one of the world’s greats, had two films in U.S. theaters this year, The Wayward Cloud and I Don’t Want…
The year: 2505. Your viewing choices tonight: an oldie but a goodie — a picture called Ass, a feature-length screensaver of butt cheeks punctuated by the occasional fart — or the hit TV show Ow! My Balls, a connoisseur’s compendium of nutsack whacks. Thanks to Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, we have…
Absolutely, unequivocally, this has been The Year of the Apatow: Judd got Knocked Up to the tune of $150 million (at the box office alone); the super-okay Superbad, which Apatow produced, grossed another $120 million, “gross” being the operative word; and at year’s end, he walks hard to the finish…
An acquaintance who fought in both Afghanistan and Iraq says he has no use for documentaries about George Bush’s bungling of the War on Terror. He has not and will not see a single one of the movies made about the tragic consequences of the administration’s rush to drop bombs…
Some years it can be hard to come up with enough stellar lead performances to make an awards minyan. But every year is a good year for supporting roles, and not just because the field has grown so wide since independent film became a force to be reckoned with. Many…
It was only a couple of years ago that the horror genre seemed newly resurgent, like an undead killer digging himself out of the grave. “Fresh-faced” directors like Eli Roth, Rob Zombie, Darren Lynn Bousman, and James Wan — many of whom were dubbed “The Splat Pack” — seemed poised…
Eastern Promises (Universal) David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen are becoming a Bizarro World Hitchcock/Cary Grant combo, and the world is a better (and bloodier) place for it. Chucklehead critics too smitten by Cronenberg’s “messages” dismissed this film — a vicious and brilliant exploration of the Russian mob in London —…
The inevitable challenge faced by Wii developers is this: Can you create a game so spectacularly awesome as to prompt a gamer to even consider ejecting Super Mario Galaxy from his console? The gravy train is over; good luck looking consumers in the eye while offering them another lame collection…
Billy Jack (Image) The Heartbreak Kid (Universal) Indie Sex: A Revealing Look at Sex in Cinema (IFC) Jimmy and Judy (Anchor Bay) Living & Dying (HBO) Resident Evil: Extinction (Sony) Seaquest DSV: Season Two (Universal) September Dawn (Sony) Shoot ‘Em Up (New Line) Solstice (Weinstein) The Tudors: The Complete First…
Early in the year, I wrote that I wondered whether I’d see a scene all season that was as astonishing to me as the one I saw in Space 55 Theater Ensemble’s Book of Liz, where actress Shawna Franks attacked a tray full of flatware with such gusto that forks…
The documentary, screened in conjunction with the library’s “Fighting the Fires of Hate: America and the Nazi Book Burnings” exhibit, features commentary by the five surviving victims of the Nazis’ sodomy statute (Paragraph 175), which led to the imprisonment or murder of approximately 100,000 German homosexuals between 1933 and 1945…
Phoenix artist Urso will take rock-carving tools in hand to dismantle a heavily adorned 350-pound boulder and create instant “chip art” that viewers can take home. She’ll also show her video Conversation Scribble Tangle. New Orleans native Berry unveils a new video installation with the Hurricane Katrina devastation at its…
The Valley gets a rare leg up on New York City and the rest of the planet with this screening of Jieho Lee’s new film, based on a Chinese proverb that says life is composed of four emotional elements: happiness, sorrow, pleasure, and love. The flick, which won’t open in…
You’re paying $3 per gallon and think you’ve got it bad. The daft and inventive indie flick Blood Car – made by Atlanta native Alex Orr for $25,000 — imagines a hellish world in which fossil fuel costs $40 per, and, not surprisingly, no one can drive. One of the…
Never mind the bollocks, Jeeves. Snatch up your y-fronts and bend a leg over to the Steel Horse Saloon for a proper invasion of vintage British and European motorcycles. The 13th annual British and European Bike Show & Swap Meet only runs for four hours, so there’s no time for…
Ever since our daddy made sure we included Roger Staubach in our nightly childhood prayers, we’ve been a sports junkie. Then, as a teenager growing up on the northside, we’d sneak into Turf Paradise to watch the magnificent thoroughbreds pound dirt until security threw us out. Now that we’re old…
“T-Bone” Hadley will drop the final curtain on his kids’ extravaganza for adults. After two years of monthly shows and a stunning array of guests that includes The Blackface Hitlers barbershop quartet, Uncle Sku’s Clubhouse will squeeze in one more excursion of fun and lessons to grow on. Will Sku…
