Each week, we’re recapping the first season of Fuller House episode by episode. Hurry, Coachella needs you on the main stage! In a world where Fuller House has dropped the Tanner clan into 2016, we can’t even with this episode. Any illusions you may have had about this being a more…
New Times picks the best things to do in metro Phoenix from April 8 to 10. Bird City Comedy Festival Phoenix has humor, people — and the Bird City Comedy Festival is here to prove it. The three-day fête à funny brings nationally known comedians and homegrown stand-ups together for 33…
There’s no shortage of festivals geared toward funny throughout the year. Montréal has Just For Laughs, San Francisco and Chicago each have a Sketchfest, and New York City has, well, New York Comedy Festival. And while Austin’s SXSW and Los Angeles’ RiotLA are only a road trip away, Arizona’s corner…
Turn to any cable news channel, and you’ll hear endless chatter about borders and immigration, both in the Americas and abroad. But for all the talk, anti-immigrant policies still prevail. So San Francisco-based artist Ana Teresa Fernandez takes a different approach, engaging community members along the U.S. and Mexico border…
Kathleen Madigan’s comedic beginnings sound a lot like the start of a joke, except Madigan really did walk into a bar — a bar that just happened to double as a comedy club. It was right next to one she worked at, she says, and after going up during an open…
In Karyn Kusama’s newest feature film, The Invitation, a group of old friends gathers in a secluded house in the Hollywood Hills, reuniting after two years of radio silence from their hosts. What follows is slow-burning suspense, testing belief systems and social niceties, under the guise of a dinner party…
New Zealand’s Cliff Curtis has been stealing scenes for years now, so it’s nice to see him playing a bona-fide lead in the new chess drama The Dark Horse. Based on the life of Genesis Potini, a bipolar Maori chess champion, the film follows a coach and a group of…
Between Stephenie Meyer and Diana Gabaldon, Phoenix has produced a pair of writing superstars who dominate the charts with everything they release. You may not like sparkly vampires or kilted Scottish lovers, but there is no denying the impact these two authors have had on speculative fiction. But Phoenix also…
A priest, a rabbi, a Buddhist monk, and the world’s first African American Surgeon General appear in a documentary called Sticky: A (Self) Love Story. And don’t worry about your mind being in the gutter, because it totally is about masturbation. The concept is simple: Nicholas Tana – an Arizona State University…
In the first scene of this three-act play — call it Who’s Afraid of Alternative Theater? or maybe Revenge of Master Ronald and the Boys — we find thespian game-changer Ron May standing in the dusty courtyard of a big, shiny, downtown playhouse. Circled by a small group of well-wishers, he is smoking…
A she-wolf of Wall Street with a spiky ginger Suze Orman shag, Michelle Darnell, the anti-heroine of fitfully funny The Boss, is the latest of the Rabelaisian wonders played by Melissa McCarthy. The actress specializes in characters with indestructible bravado, no matter where they stand on the socioeconomic ladder; Michelle,…
And they keep on coming: After the international critical and commercial breakthroughs of Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation and The Past, Fireworks Wednesday represents the second of his earlier films to receive a belated U.S. release. As was the case with About Elly — made in 2009 but given a stateside…
Scottsdale Desert Stages Theatre is moving to the former Harkins Fashion Square 7 movie theater location inside Scottsdale Fashion Square. The nonprofit theatrical group, which has been located at 4720 North Scottsdale Road since 2004, announced the news on Monday, April 4. “We are delighted to announce our plans to move into such a prominent…
Spring is usually a cinematic wasteland. Oscar season is almost a year away, and the glut of bloated summer action flicks hasn’t started its assault on our senses (Batman v. Superman aside). The Phoenix Film Festival fills in the gaps, in the best ways possible, starting on Thursday, April 7, with…
All season, I’ve been counting the weeks until Arizona Theatre Company’s production of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, which opened on Saturday and runs through mid-April. Despite my anticipation, I was not, by and large, disappointed. Steinbeck wrote the adaption of his 1937 novella that same year, when it…
A fractured film about a fractured family, Louder Than Bombs takes a potentially tired premise and reshapes it before our eyes. It opens on a newborn’s tiny hand helplessly clinging to a father’s finger, and ends with a different father watching his two sons sleep. In between is a story…
Clowning, bullet-riddled rom-com Mr. Right is awfully charming in the best and worse sense of the phrase. It’s often kind of awful but also weirdly, effervescently charming, a movie that salves, with its stars’ radiance and charisma, even as it grates. What hurts: lots of vaguely comic hitman drama, with…
“‘Shaken-baby syndrome’ is in the realm of mythology,” says neurosurgeon Ayub Ommaya in archival footage featured in the documentary The Syndrome. Yet it was Ommaya’s research on monkeys in the 1960s upon which law enforcement and a few medical experts built the shaken-baby syndrome hysteria-industrial complex — a fact he…
Jean-Marc Vallée’s Demolition presents an interesting experiment: What if you told a story of tragedy but withheld all the tenderness and emotion from it, so that you were left — at least until the very end — with just literal and figurative wreckage, disconnected fragments seeking to be put back…
April’s First Friday in Phoenix was bustling as people descended on downtown to check out the latest Fortoul Brothers show in their 40 Owls pop-up gallery, hit a MOD-AZ show at Chartreuse that helped to usher in Modern Phoenix Week, and explore shoes decked out in everything from rhinestones to…
New Times picks the best things to do from Monday, April 4, to Thursday, April 7. The Circus Let us blow your mind: For 16 years, GateWay Community College has shared its film program with the general public a couple of times a year. In tandem with the Valley of the…
When Roosevelt Row landed on the radar of the Arizona Legislature earlier this year, it seemed like everyone knew (or thought they knew) what was best for the area, which is recognized as one of the country’s top neighborhoods and art districts. The Phoenix City Council voted on January 20 to…
