The ludicrous but amusing teen social-media thriller Nerve is committed to pinning its characters into a world we understand as ours. It opens with Skype, Spotify, Gmail, and Chrome, all on the MacBook screen of a mousily beautiful teen, Vee (Emma Roberts), who you just know is one horrific adventure…
Anna Gunn actually gets to do things in Meera Menon’s expansive high-finance drama Equity, which is almost reason enough to recommend it right there. The Breaking Bad co-star tears into the role of a rainmaking banker taking a Silicon Valley company public. For once, it’s Gunn whose character gets to…
Jack Pettibone Riccobono’s The Seventh Fire opens on dark, grainy footage of a highway at dusk before cutting to an overhead shot of a long stretch of forest, and then to two Native American men in a canoe, harvesting worms from a quiet lake. They take the worms home, where…
In Patricia Rozema’s quiet, sci-fi-lite thriller Into the Forest, the power goes out pretty quickly, but the film itself is electric. Nell (Ellen Page) studies for the SAT and chats with her boyfriend on a futuristic floating computer screen, while her sister Eva (Evan Rachel Wood) twists her body into…
Barbara Kopple’s Miss Sharon Jones! tells the kind of true story that makes you want to kick creation itself square in the crotch. Here’s that firecracker soul singer, nearing her 60s, her boogie still majestic, her band still a tight retro marvel, her wail still the southern end of a northbound…
Every other year, New Times puts the spotlight on Phoenix’s creative forces — painters, dancers, designers, and actors. Leading up to the release of Best of Phoenix, we’re taking a closer look at 100 more. Welcome to the 2016 edition of 100 Creatives. Up today is 53. Joan Waters. “My…
New Times picks the best things to do in metro Phoenix from Friday, July 22, through Sunday, July 24. “Water” Using fine-art aerial photographs taken around the globe, Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky raises questions about humanity’s relationship to water. Forty of his large-scale color prints are part of an exhibition…
The Phoenix art scene will have a new venue this fall, when art boutique hotel FOUND:RE opens in Central Phoenix. Developers include Habitat Metro, the Phoenix-based firm that created Portland on the Park and Portland Place condos, and Bond Partners. They had hoped to open FOUND:RE in spring 2016. But renovations…
A more appropriate title for Jason Bourne might be Walking: The Motion Picture. This fifth entry in the franchise loosely (very loosely) based on Robert Ludlum’s best-selling novels brings back director Paul Greengrass and star Matt Damon to continue the tale of the good soldier-turned-amnesiac-assassin-turned-rogue agent doing battle against his…
We’re recapping Difficult People, episode by episode. Dear mom who art in heaven, thank you for this free student haircut I’m about to receive. “I’m just an in-between,” Judy Garland once sang, lamenting being stranded between childhood and adulthood, something that permanently dogged her and her career. In Difficult People’s “Italian…
Every other year, New Times puts the spotlight on Phoenix’s creative forces — painters, dancers, designers, and actors. Leading up to the release of Best of Phoenix, we’re taking a closer look at 100 more. Welcome to the 2016 edition of 100 Creatives. Up today is 54. Robert Hoekman Jr…
With the introduction of Instagram in 2010, photo sharing has become something of a novice’s pastime, to say the least. With upward of 400 million ‘grammers worldwide, people are sharing the good, the bad, and the ugly at an alarming rate. For nature lovers and outdoor enthusiasts, beautiful landscapes are pouring…
Every other year, New Times puts the spotlight on Phoenix’s creative forces — painters, dancers, designers, and actors. Leading up to the release of Best of Phoenix, we’re taking a closer look at 100 more. Welcome to the 2016 edition of 100 Creatives. Up today is 55. Mary Meyer. “My…
No matter the medium, your social media feeds are more than likely choked with political rants, someone else’s dinner, a wine glass on the edge of a bathtub, and about a thousand photos of a cat, dog, or baby of unknown provenance. But are we oversharing our personal lives, just…
Ralph Remington, a theater professional and former arts administrator with both Actors’ Equity Association and National Endowment for the Arts, has been hired by the City of Tempe as its Arts and Culture Deputy Director. It’s a new position created within Tempe’s Community Services Department to further implementing its 2015…
25 years ago, Annie Leibovitz stunned America with her infamous portrait of Demi Moore — nude, bronzed, seven months pregnant — on the cover of Vanity Fair. The image of Moore’s proud, bare body, heavy with child and unmistakably erotic, meant that in some states the magazine had to be…
Like the real 1980s, Stranger Things gets more unsettling as it goes. The opening episode of the Netflix show, created by the Duffer Brothers, gives us swear-y, scruffy kids playing D&D and then, beneath a lavish suburban starscape, encountering the unknown — which one of the boys promptly hides in…
Arizona Theatre Company, which announced on June 27 that it needed to raise $2 million to avoid closing, has reached its fundraising goal, according to a statement released on Monday, July 18. It’s good news for the Tucson-based company founded in 1966, which is Arizona’s only member of the prestigious…
Every other year, New Times puts the spotlight on Phoenix’s creative forces — painters, dancers, designers, and actors. Leading up to the release of Best of Phoenix, we’re taking a closer look at 100 more. Welcome to the 2016 edition of 100 Creatives. Up today is 56. Forrest Solis. Forrest…
New Times picks the best things to do in metro Phoenix from Monday, July 18, through Thursday, July 20. For more options, see our curated online calendar. Camera Obscura Workshop What happens when you mix an ice-fishing tent with a white board? If you’re hanging out with photographer David Emitt Adams,…
It’s just after 9 p.m. on a recent evening, and Tempe Beach Park is alive with activity and teeming with people, despite the summertime scorch. Sweltering heat fills the air and radiates from all the concrete, making things a little uncomfortable for the hundreds of that have gathered here at…
Does it matter that Freddy Krueger was a pedophilic middle-school janitor who died in a blazing fire when parents sought revenge? No. And unless you’re a horror-film obsessive, you probably don’t even know how he morphed into a pizza-faced Where’s Waldo with knife fingers — what matters is he lives…
