The Phoenix Film Festival screens more than 150 feature films, documentaries, and shorts, and sadly, there’s simply no way our eyeballs can be in so many places at once. In an attempt to help you navigate and whittle down your choices from the masses, here’s a list of our Top…
Fans of Lisa Starry and her choreography might remember Water Dreams, her original water-themed production that debuted more than 10 years ago. It won her rave reviews, and in the years since, she’s only ingratiated herself all the more with Valley dance aficionados through her consistently lovable works, including the…
We know: The beginning of the work week sucks. But if you take a quick look at the calendar, you’ll see we’re off to a pretty good week of art events, sporting events, dance parties, and more. Here are our must-see events from now to the weekend . . …
If Bob Ross were alive today, he’d be painting happy little trees all over the place in ecstatic fervor for all the arts and culture happenings in Phoenix. To help you see the forest for the trees, here’s a recap of the top arts and culture stories of the week…
At long last the weekend has arrived. Here’s how to spend it. Chris Tucker @ Celebrity Theatre Go ahead and call it a comeback. After effectively dropping off the face of the earth following the release of 2007’s massively successful Rush Hour 3, comedian Chris Tucker is relaunching his career…
Take note and give your creative friends a big pat on the back — we’re announcing the finalists for the 2013 Big Brain Awards. The award was created to recognize emerging local creatives, and for the past few weeks we’ve been narrowing the long list of submissions to 18 finalists…
It’s hard to beat a birds-eye view of the landscape and the structures assembled on it simply for the context of how everything fits together. Pilot and photographer Adriel Heisey has been flying across the southwest for nearly 30 years, casting his view upon a plethora of prehistoric ruins and…
We’re throwing a party. Our annual Big Brain Awards celebrate emerging creatives in a variety of media throughout the Valley (and give them cash prizes to put toward their passions). And while you’ll have to wait until this afternoon to find out who the finalists are, you’re more than welcome…
If you’ve looked at a calendar lately, you know that Phoenix’s small window of good weather is about to close. Time to break out the yoga mat and get your “om” on at these (almost) free outdoor yoga and pilates classes. Poolside Yoga at the Montelucia Get resort-style relaxation without…
With the numerous galleries that now populate both Grand Avenue and Roosevelt Row (not to mention the staggering crowds that flock downtown each month for First Friday), it’s sometimes hard to imagine the Phoenix art scene of times past. For those of us who have been here over the years,…
Trunk Space co-owner JRC is one of the biggest nerds in the Valley, and we mean that in the nicest way possible. He’s big into comic books, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Carl Sagan, and various other brainy subject matter. So it’s apropos that he’d dub the sequel to the…
If you haven’t stopped into The Torch Theatre on Central Avenue in Phoenix for an improv show, you’re missing out. The group, headed up by board members Bill Binder, Jose Gonzalez, Jacque Arend, Sam Haldiman, Nina Miller, Mack Duncan, Shane Shannon, and Tommy Schaeffer , is consistently reinventing itself in…
During their heyday of the 1980s, the forces of G.I. Joe tirelessly traveled around the globe defeating the evil world-conquering schemes of terrorist organization Cobra both in the animated episodes of their epic cartoon and Marvel comic book. This Saturday, however, these Real American Heroes embark on a different sort…
Steve Wiley is Jackalope Ranch’s Parent Hood. He’s a slightly unorthodox father of five who will weigh in weekly with his mildly rebellious views and observations. If you’d like to see how he came to write this column, watch the intro video. This week, he lists some powerful-yet-short statements for…
The setup: For many of us late Boomers of the Valley, La Cage aux Folles was the first foreign film we got to go see all by ourselves as young adults, setting a standard for both comedy and the mainstreaming of gay cinema that’s been hard to match since. See…
An actress in her 30s — a woman, that is, still playing characters of babymaking age — may have it even tougher than actresses in their 40s and 50s. Unless she is exceedingly glamorous, à la Charlize Theron, she can all too easily get stranded in the land of mom…
In 1988, the fate of Chile and its dictator came down to a ballot as simple as a middle-schooler’s do-you-like-me? note. A referendum offered citizens a simple choice: a “yes” for allowing President Augusto Pinochet to return to office for another eight years, having clung to power since his 1973…
Two sacred texts of the ’50s proto-counterculture have escaped the rapacious machine of cinema adaptation for a half-century. One is J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, which probably only would have worked starring Salinger himself, and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, that ecstatic recount of crossings and recrossings of North…
Here’s a tale that explains everything: A young Philip Roth, trying to shove his teen brain through Ulysses, is struck by a passage about Leopold Bloom’s public masturbation. Watching a girl watching fireworks, Bloom manipulates himself through a hole cut in his trouser pocket, the act gilded with Joycean rhapsodies…
Like the blood that gushes forth from the elevators of the Overlook Hotel, brilliant/ridiculous theories of what Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is really about have for years surged madly and memorably — especially online, where the internet’s dead-ends, blind links, and back-where-you-started arguments just might be another part of the…
Luther (Netflix Link) Golden Globe winner and impossible-handsomeness standard-bearer Idris Elba is Detective Chief Inspector John Luther, a brilliant investigator with a complete inability to detach from the darkness of his work. In the pilot, he investigates chilling psychopath Alice Morgan, played by Ruth Wilson — he knows, but cannot…
“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” So goes the adage from John Ford’s 1962 classic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and so it has gone for Heaven’s Gate, the class-war Western written and directed by one of Ford’s truest disciples among contemporary…
