“Artists of the Black Community” at West Valley Art Museum: Arizona’s African-American community offers a collection of paintings and sculptures as colorful as its members, eschewing muted Southwest pastels in favor of unconventional shades like amethyst and chartreuse. Every piece radiates with uninhibited energy, from Belinda Wilson’s stained-glass woman to…
David Salcido is big on titles. As a flack for Artists’ Theatre Project, the smallish local troupe he co-founded, he’s known as the Master of Hoopla and Revelries. At the underground zine Blue Food, he’s called the Chaos Coordinator. And in all seriousness, Salcido’s playbill bio refers to him as…
The Queen is more fun than any movie about the violent death of a 36-year-old woman has a right to be. It’s also as exotic an English-language picture as the season is likely to bring. Directed by Stephen Frears from Peter Morgan’s script, The Queen is set in the peculiar…
If the greatest magicians never reveal their tricks, then Christopher Nolan wouldn’t make it past the children’s birthday party circuit. It’s not that Nolan has anything against the old hocus-pocus, but it’s the practical side of magic that appeals to him most — the nuts-and-bolts explanation behind the seemingly “impossible”…
A single photograph, we’re told early on in Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers, can win or lose a war. But sometimes, that photo shows us only part of the story, whether it’s the part we don’t want to see — slaughtered villagers at My Lai, tortured prisoners at Abu…
Drop-dead hip or cluelessly clueless? Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, a candy-colored portrait of France’s infamous teen queen, is a graceful, charming, and sometimes witty confection — at least for its first hour. The famously shy Coppola may be an inscrutable personality, but her bold exposé of backstage royalty opens with…
Front-loaded with family discord, terminal cancer, prodigal jailbait, a cute kiddy looking for love, and other accessories of the ready-to-wear soap opera, Zhang Yimou’s Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles is as heartfelt, sincere, and soggy with nostalgia as some of his other periodic homages to the virtues of peasant…
Thirty years ago, it was considered clever to spoof obscure science-fiction films. Stage musicals like The Rocky Horror Show and movies like Phantom of the Paradise were all the rage, and movie nerds who knew our George Pal and our Herschell Gordon Lewis felt vindicated in our passion for cheesy…
Listen up, P-Town peeps. When it comes to holidays, Halloween is the shizzle. What other day on the calendar allows you to transform yourself into a pimp, priest, or politician without getting glares from onlookers? Back during your juvie delinquent days, you spent most of the year agonizing over which…
Ice hockey isn’t for the weak of heart. It’s a bruising, fast-paced game, featuring large sticks, razor-sharp blades, and far too many angry Canadians. Of course, hockey’s scrappy style is exactly why people love the blue-collar sport. For chrissakes, Stanley Cup winners chug Labatt’s out of the trophy during the…
American Dreamz (Universal) Till this, Paul Weitz had a stellar filmography, a career in ascension: American Pie (good), About a Boy (great), In Good Company (absolutely perfect). But this, er, satire about a dumb American president (Dennis Quaid, channeling whassisname) trying to get smart, a cynical wanna-be singer trying to…
Yours, Anne: It sounds like the punch line to an unfortunate joke, but this musical adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank is utterly serious. Presented as a song cycle rather than a traditional book musical, Yours, Anne presents Frank’s legendary journal as a series of dramatic scenes set to…
Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Season Two (Universal) Anytown USA (Film Movement/Repnet) Behind Enemy Lines II: Axis of Evil (Fox) The Big Black Comedy Show (Fox) Big Love: The Complete First Season (HBO) The Break-Up (Universal) Clean, Shaven: The Criterion Collection (Criterion) Feast: Unrated (Weinstein) Frankenhooker (Anthem) Charmed: The Complete Sixth Season…
The Andy Milonakis Show: The Complete Second Season (Paramount) The A-Team: Season Five, the Final Season (Universal) Bloodied but Unbowed: Bloodshot Records’ Life in the Trenches (Bloodshot) Carlos Mencia: No Strings Attached (Paramount) Click (Sony) Don’t Go in the Woods Alone: 25th Anniversary Edition (Code Red) Everybody Hates Chris: The…
It all started 2.6 million years ago, when some smart monkey used a sharp rock to slice up his prehistoric supper. Today, our supply of tools has evolved, along with our upright spines and opposable thumbs. One visit to Home Depot and you can see how far the species has…
Do you think you’re a good person? When’s the last time you took stock? It might be time to do just that — and make sure you give yourself more than five minutes, because it may take a while. Nathan Feller’s art is not the typical imagery one would associate…
There is no way of sidestepping the issue, so why not jump right into it: Infamous, this year’s retelling of how Truman Capote wound up in Kansas writing his nonfiction novel In Cold Blood, never comes close to approaching the quiet, devastating brilliance of Capote, last year’s retelling of how…
Barry Levinson hasn’t made a movie of note in almost a decade — since 1997’s Wag the Dog, to be precise, and even that was less a work of substantial relevance than a bit of lucky timing based on someone else’s better novel. Granted, it had its moments — at…
In The Last King of Scotland, an adequate thriller redeemed by Forest Whitaker’s sensational turn as Idi Amin, freshly qualified Scottish physician Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy) arrives in Uganda in 1970, ravenous for adventure. Under the rigorous and vaguely romantic tutelage of a lithe blonde with a flabby marriage and…
Generic VH1 rock doc The U.S. vs. John Lennon is snazzy, mawkish, and practically Pavlovian in recycling all requisite late-’60s images. Given its subject, though, this David Leaf-John Scheinfeld production is not only poignant but even topical. Once upon a time, in the summer of 1971, John Lennon and Yoko…
Singer-actress Karen Morrow’s long and varied career has brought her acclaim (an Emmy and a tall stack of Dramalogue Awards) and some pretty wide-ranging roles (Parthy in the 1994 touring revival of Showboat; Endora-wanna-be Aunt Minerva on the treacly Bewitched spin-off, Tabitha). On her way to town to teach a…
You’ve seen Bob Ross — the afro-sporting TV artist who painted “happy trees”? Well, if he had redesigned Legend of Zelda, it would look a lot like Okami. That may sound like an unlikely premise, but this is no ordinary game. In Okami, to save the world from an ancient…
