On the wintry Sabbath referred to by the title of Jonathan Nossiter’s Sunday, a middle-aged homeless man wanders the streets of Queens. Nothing new there. His name is Oliver (David Suchet), and he used to be a married, white-collar company man with IBM, but now he’s divorced, alone, sleeping in…
thursday october 16 UK/AZ You Like It: Phoenix Symphony’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ATOP’s The Essential Henry V, ATC’s Blithe Spirit and More Stuff From Beyond the Pond: The UK/AZ Festival celebrates the–rather tenuous–connection(s) between England and Arizona. Guest conductor Christopher Wilkins wields the baton in Phoenix Symphony’s presentation of…
You can recognize a lady by her elegant hair/but a genuine princess is exceedingly rare . . . –Once Upon a Mattress In the states, we make up for not having our own actual royalty by slinging regal titles as insults: Welfare Queen, Jewish American Princess, royal pain–even kingpin has…
It’s hard to fault The House of Yes, the wry toast of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, for its limitations as a film. In fact, it’s hardly a film at all–rather, it’s a barely staged, five-handed farce that trails its amiable cast around a looming Victorian mansion during the course…
Seven Years in Tibet feels more like Seven Days at the Movies. It refuses to come to life–not even when prodded by Brad Pitt, hirsute as a yak, wandering the frozen Himalayas with an Austrian accent that probably gave his dialogue coach the hives. It’s an epic about how an…
The first scene of Different for Girls is both lyrical and chilling–a teenage boy (Stephen Walker) showers in a school locker room, posed like a Raphaelite statue, with his genitals tucked out of sight. Classmates, fully clothed, approach him through the steam and begin to harass him, until another boy…
thursday october 9 Further Stuff From Beyond the Pond: UK/AZ’s “Wallace and Gromit” Mania, “Rootstein Mannequins” and More: The UK/AZ Festival, continuing through October (though some of the offerings extend beyond Allhallows Eve), celebrates the–rather tenuous–connection(s) between England and Arizona. Nick Park’s beloved claymation characters “Wallace and Gromit” (Wallace is…
By its very definition, a thriller should, you know, thrill. It should not only scare its audience with a quick jolt, that sudden noise in the dark that comes from nowhere and fills everywhere, but with its slow burn. It’s not enough for a thriller to tell its story, to…
Oliver Stone’s low-budget, hopped-up film noir, U-Turn, is being billed as a change of pace for the conspiracy dude, but actually it looks quite at home in the maestro’s hothouse. After all, aren’t conspiracies and the workings of fate what noirs are all about? Stone’s JFK pulped history with the…
Janeane Garofalo plows right through her new film, The Matchmaker, with the same disgruntled sarcasm that typifies her testy, standard-bearer-for-the-underdog persona. Try though it may to cast “America’s favorite antistar” in a “romantic comedy for people who don’t like romantic comedy,” this script, a wholesale retread of Local Hero (which,…
thursday october 2 UK/AZ You Like It: Othello, Zandra Rhodes, “Rootstein Mannequins” and Other Stuff From Beyond the Pond: The UK/AZ Festival, continuing through October (though some of the offerings extend beyond Allhallows Eve), celebrates the–rather tenuous–connection(s) between England and Arizona. Britain’s Royal National Theatre–making its inaugural visit to the…
Everybody likes to run down Canadian movies, but Canadian film festivals–I speak of Montreal and Toronto–are something else again. How can a country turn out such mediocre movies and such terrific film festivals? In Hollywood, at least, we’re consistent: Our movies and our film festivals are equally lousy. I started…
The Peacemaker is the first feature from DreamWorks, the studio headed by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen. It stars George Clooney and Nicole Kidman, and it’s about terrorists who steal Russian nukes. As an intelligence officer with the U.S. Army’s Special Forces, Clooney gets to model his jutting…
thursday september 25 Dave Brubeck: Best known as the progenitor of cool jazz in the ’50s (and for “Take Five,” one of the all-time standard-bearers of cool), the West Coast pianist/bandleader is a giant of jazz–period, and no modifier required. Granted, the Brubeck sound cracked open the door, far off…
There’s a lovely formality to the structure of the comedy Wedding Bell Blues. Three young women (Paulina Porizkova, Illeana Douglas and Julie Warner), roomies, take a road trip to Vegas, with the vague plan of getting married, then immediately divorced. Their notion is that a 30ish divorcee is less pathetic…
Every film adaptation of a preexisting work has its own unique set of problems; in the case of Jocelyn Moorhouse’s A Thousand Acres, the problem is compounded. Not only was Jane Smiley’s 1991 novel a Pulitzer Prize-winning best seller with a large number of (presumably) devoted fans, but the book…
Howard and Emily’s wedding is the talk of Greenleaf, Indiana, a small town idyllic enough to repel Norman Rockwell. The town has waited three years for the couple to make it official–and slimmed-down Emily (Joan Cusack) has waited three long years for Howard (Kevin Kline) to consummate their relationship. She’s…
The 1950s-era Los Angeles of L.A. Confidential is Noir Central. Its denizens are tattooed by shadow; the play of light and dark in the streets, the police stations, the morgues, is fetishistic. The postwar L.A. touted in the travelogues and billboards is a boom town, but what we actually see…
thursday september 18 Ballet Arizona’s “Black & White Gala”: The troupe’s formal, season-opening bash features world-class hoofers and a wide-ranging repertoire. The highlights: the premiere of “Solo for a Gala” by BA artistic director Michael Uthoff, danced by Jeremy Raia; Kevin O’Day (Twyla Tharp’s company, Baryshnikov’s White Oak Project) performing…
Aaah, the unspoiled West: Big space. Big light. Big view. Big lure for the millions who yearly go searching for the serenity and wilderness behind this popular yet fading image. For the most part, it is the image featured in Phoenix Art Museum’s “Canyonland Visions,” a show highlighting artists’ portrayals…
A quarter mile northeast from the Church of the Orbital Orgy, a family–mom, dad, big brother, sis–sat on a couch, watching television. “They’re toast,” I thought. And they were. The couch suddenly lurched forward, jerked to a stop for a second, then hyperaccelerated and smashed into the TV, which was…
The Game is a puzzle picture, and beyond its premise there isn’t much you can divulge without giving the show away. I’m not one of those critics who likes to write Stop reading now if you plan to see this movie, so I’m tempted to wrap up things right now…
