Like his Hero and House of Flying Daggers, Zhang Yimou’s third global-market gigaproduction makes little sense in narrative terms even after two screenings, but the sets, costumes, and cinematography are so intoxicating that it doesn’t much matter. Zhang’s interest in the wuxia (martial arts) film may well extend no further…
Mayme Kratz, 48, is the type of person you just want to hug when you meet her. With a nest of curly auburn hair and a calming smile, she owns a natural beauty that ignites intuition and openness. Her serenity boldly invades her luminescent sculpture of embedded natural objects in…
It’s been 20 years since the first Castlevania bewitched gamers with its gothic horror. Twenty years of vampire hunters going fist to fang with Lord Dracula. With almost two dozen titles in the series, Castlevania is one of the most enduring and beloved game franchises of all time. Castlevania: Portrait…
Bandidas (Fox) This review is not long enough for a suitable treatment of the beauty of Penàlope Cruz and Salma Hayek. The makers of Bandidas would certainly prefer I tried, though, than to discuss this plodding clichà of a western featuring the two. You could write the script right now…
Alison Dunn at eye lounge: Viewers, on average, spend less than five seconds looking at any one painting in a museum or gallery. This statistic doesn’t bode well for Alison Dunn, whose murky mixed-media paintings at first appear to be simple abstractions. A closer look reveals an underlying depth and…
America’s Funniest Home Videos: Salute to Romance (Shout Factory) Behind the Mask (Good Times) Broken Bridges (Paramount) Color of the Cross (Fox) Conversations With Other Women (Hart Sharp) Crank (Lions Gate) Everybody Says I’m Fine (BFS) Good Morning World (S’More) Hello Kitty’s Animation Theater: Complete Collection (ADV) Live Nude Girls…
It’s official: Hollywood has run out of original ideas. If you thought 2006 was bad, just wait. In 2007, the studios will give up on birthing blockbusters and instead concentrate on cloning them, with sequel after sequel after sequel. Familiar titles will be followed by so many numbers that filmgoers…
On an early December afternoon at the offices of Malpaso Productions, Clint Eastwood’s four Academy Awards have been placed into thick velvet carrying bags, while that famous poncho — the one Eastwood donned for the entirety of Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy — is being carefully loaded into a large shipping…
James Longley’s Iraq in Fragments is a one-man production of startling audacity and aesthetic provocation. It isn’t just that Longley (Gaza Strip) worked unembedded in Iraq for two years after the start of the war, gaining access to the stories of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds in wartime and risking his…
A car speeds down a forest road, only to be surrounded in an instant by armed crazies who materialize from the nearby woods. In the visual grammar of big-budget action films, the sequence that ensues should be a scattergun barrage of images: Wheels! Guns! Blood! Shriek! Fireball! Crash! Add a…
Made when he was a stripling of 24, Argentine filmmaker Daniel Burman’s first feature, A Chrysanthemum Burst in Cincoesquinas, was a violent story of love and revenge. He must have gotten that out of his system: Though Burman’s subsequent movies also traffic in what he calls “the great transitions of…
Dashiell Hammett goes to high school — the perfect studio pitch. Yet after wowing ’em at the film fests, Rian Johnson’s knockout debut as writer and director, Brick, languished in theaters and on DVD. It took a bunk, as Hammett mighta said, and wound up wearing a wooden kimono. Johnson,…
Notes on a Scandal, brilliantly adapted by Patrick Marber from the darkly comic Zoë Heller novel, is a grim piece of work — Fatal Attraction for the art-house crowd, shorn of its predecessor’s fearful misogyny. Set in a dreary London where a gray funk of fog and cigarette smoke hangs…
A multimillion-euro adaptation of a best-selling German novel, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer relates the life of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw), born in 18th-century Paris with a uniquely puissant sense of smell. He begins life as an orphan, sold into servitude to a brutal tanner, but in Toucan Sam…
Little Children, a second excursion into middle-class unease by Todd Field after his intelligent but overrated In the Bedroom, opens with a slow pan around a living room whose shelves are crowded with cheap china figurines of . . . little children. Twisted into insidious grins, their blood-red lips ooze…
Forced to give a name to the past year in theater, I would have to call it The Year of Ron May, because while many of his compatriots struggled to act, direct, run a credible theater or even just handle publicity for one, this quadruple-threat actor/director/artistic director/publicist excelled at each…
Despite Link’s green tunic and Peter Pan hat, he remains Nintendo’s most respected badass. In the long-awaited Twilight Princess for the Wii, the elf hero begins yet another quest to save the world with his trademark bombs and boomerangs. Minor déjà vu aside, Twilight Princess becomes nothing short of an…
Eraserhead (Absurda/Subversive) — Finally available on DVD, David Lynch’s debut film is as captivating and frustrating as it ever was. The print looks great in its own weird way, and the feature-length doc shows Lynch speaking more clearly about his art than his normally cryptic style allows. A History of…
42nd Street: On the avenue they’re taking you to . . . the one where the girl goes out a dancer “but comes back a star!” This popular musical has been revived countless times, but it’s still best known in its original context: as the classic Warner Bros. tuner in…
The thing about freak shows is that they make it really easy to find the freaks. On the first Saturday of every month, Phoenix has its very own aberrant act — the KARN EVIL Strange & Unusual Carnival Freak Show. The shock fest features the deviant antics of Dr. Reverend…
Monday has historically sucked for everybody but football sluts, but it bites no more thanks to Shimmy, a weekly multimedia mega-mixer. Dig this shit: DJs Diosa, Hyder, and Felicetti crank trip-hop, house, neo-soul, and liquid funk while aerosol artists graf it up, and classic flicks unspool on the patio. Mondays,…
During a recent visit to the newly expanded Phoenix Art Museum, I overheard a fellow patron say, “The art at this museum never ceases to disappoint me on a regular basis.” Funny, that’s just how I felt about “Modern by Nature: Ansel Adams in the 1930s,” a retrospective meant to…
