As a result of having recently witnessed Phoenix Theatre’s production of Tintypes, I am much too ill to write a theater review this week. Instead, I am submitting the notes I made while watching this program, a musical revue about turn-of-the-19th-century America, which should (despite several lively performances by some…
Film director Agnieszka Holland is the daughter of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, but she was raised in communist Poland in an atmosphere of state-imposed atheism. If those bona fides don’t qualify her to make a two-hour movie about the timeless tug of war between faith and reason,…
Twenty-seven-year-old Ben Younger delivers the message of his first feature, Boiler Room, with all the subtlety of a car bomb. To wit: Greed is alive and well in the new century, fueled by the material dreams of a generation bent on instant gratification and the distorted expectations of neophyte investors…
A late addition to the repertory company headed by A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood, Tigger has enjoyed a surge in popularity in recent years. That is, the Disney incarnation of Tigger has — the hyperactive, striped feline with the spring-loaded tail in Disney’s Winnie the…
When you read the reviews of MOMIX, you see every description under the celestial bodies. The members of this dance troupe have been called magicians, illusionists, surrealists and acrobats. Their performances are called supernatural, stunning, seductive, brilliant, hilarious and inspirational. Almost as an afterthought, the shows are also called an…
When Blues Blast 2000 hits the Valley this weekend, it will offer a bit of the old and a bit of the new, some national acts, some local celebs, and a day of fun in the sun. One of the highlights at this year’s festival will be longtime Chicago blues…
It is not your typical art opening. There are no paintings on the wall, no spotlighted sculptures on pedestals. The usual clusters of murmuring, wineglass-wielding museumgoers, clad in black and ignoring the artwork, are nowhere in sight at the kick-off of “Club Extra,” the ongoing performance/installation created by artist Angela…
Warren Leight’s Side Man is both a perfect example of the American memory play and proof that a Broadway season filled with revivals and imports can produce a Tony win. Side Man won that award last year, despite its rather old-fashioned narrative structure and at least partly because it wasn’t…
Hedda Gabler’s come to town, and she ain’t, as the saying goes, what she used to be. That’s mostly because, in Actors Theatre of Phoenix’s production of Henrik Ibsen’s masterpiece, director Matthew Wiener has taken some unusual liberties with Rolf Fjelde’s popular translation. This classic story of a mean-spirited, batty…
Jane Campion’s 1992 film The Piano was an intoxicating work of art, a film of such beauty and power that it literally took my breath away. Nothing the New Zealand-born writer-director has done before or since even comes close to matching it in form, content or sensibility. And her latest…
A little more than three years after Scream and a little more than two years after Scream 2, director Wes Craven is back with Scream 3, this time without the participation of star screenwriter Kevin Williamson. From the very start, we have been told that Williamson planned for the series…
By far, the most creative thing about Snow Day is its clever integration of the studio logo into the narrative at the very beginning. As a man shovels snow from his driveway, a gigantic snowball falls from the sky and crushes his house. It’s a wonderfully anarchic moment, boding well…
Fans of Jonathan Richman frequently find themselves answering the question, “Jonathan who?” It’s not a household name, after all. Some will go into an explanation of Richman’s early years when his band, the Modern Lovers, paved the way for the punk-rock explosion of the mid-’70s with angsty beauties like “Pablo…
For those who aren’t film-festivaled out after last weekend’s New Times Flashback Film Festival or the Phoenix Jewish Film Festival, this week there’s the fourth annual Phoenix International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, this year titled “Out Far!” The venue is Harkins Camelview 5, located on Goldwater Boulevard north of…
One quick look at the huge mixed-media paintings of artist William T. Wiley — now on display in “Recent and Relevant” at Scottsdale’s Riva Yares Gallery — and it becomes crystal clear that Wiley is a man who must never sleep. That’s probably because, for 40 years, this consummate artist…
The subject matter is surely the stuff of which can’t-miss movies are made: Jacqueline Susann, author of the best seller Valley of the Dolls and other jerk-off (pardon, “maddeningly sexy,” to quote Helen Gurley Brown) classic lit. There was nothing at all pedestrian about the woman who was regaled in…
Director Chen Kaige is best known in the U.S. for Farewell My Concubine, the most successful Chinese production ever released here. As many pointed out at the time, this Oscar-nominated 1993 epic of modern Chinese history may have been wholly Chinese in both content and viewpoint, but it was still,…
February must be film-festival season here in the Valley. You can’t swing a dead movie geek — though it’s worth a try — without hitting a festival. The first of at least three February fests is the New Times Flashback Film Fest, a blowout of faves, with one obscure curio,…
The three virtuoso musicians who make up Trio Voronezh — that’s “Vo-RO-nesh” to the non-Russian speakers among us — have come a long way in a short time. These graduates of the Classical Conservatory in Voronezh, Russia, began their careers together playing some unusual venues. They worked in small concert…
The computer-animated kiddy feature Sinbad: Beyond the Veil of Mists aspires to nothing more than Saturday-matinee thrills for the preadolescent crowd. The obvious direct source for the content is the cycle of Sinbad the Sailor fantasies — The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974) and…
It’s easy to see how Play It to the Bone, writer-director Ron Shelton’s latest comedy-drama, got started. Shelton obviously wanted to do for boxing what he’d already done for baseball in Bull Durham, golf in Tin Cup and pickup basketball in White Men Can’t Jump. But somewhere along the way,…
Many of us latter-day Arizona settlers fled the northeast precisely because we found the words “winter” and “fest” don’t go together well. But for those who are nostalgic for biting cold, punishing winds and treacherous snow, Flagstaff Winterfest is here again. The 14th annual chill-out to the north kicks off…
