Commander in Chief: 2-Disc Inaugural Edition Part 1 (Disney) The Complete Sherlock Holmes Collection (MPI) Cow Belles (Disney) Danger After Dark (TLA) Evil (Magnolia) Is It Really So Strange? (Frameline) Failure to Launch (Paramount) Family Affair: Season One (MPI) Fear Factor: The First Season (Universal) Imagine Me & You (Fox)…
Berlin is so hot right now. And the Phoenix Art Museum knows it. It has organized a major survey of contemporary art made in the reunified Berlin, the art spot of the moment. With a title like “Constructing New Berlin,” I expected the art to deal with the city as…
Click may be the first Adam Sandler movie in which the high concept isn’t dependent upon the star. Sandler comedies tend to take his standard character of the petulant man-child with anger-management issues and place him in different wacky situations: elementary school (Billy Madison), the golf course (Happy Gilmore), the…
About three-quarters of the way through Waist Deep, the hero of the piece — an indestructible ex-convict who calls himself O2 (2 Fast 2 Furious star Tyrese Gibson) — peers out through the swirling smoke and the bloody mayhem of an urban killing ground and experiences a revelation. “Somethin’ ain’t…
Not long ago, videogames were about collecting coins and rescuing the princess. Now you’re more likely to gun her down in a drive-by. Or eat her alive. Welcome to JAWS Unleashed. You’re a pitiless great white, hungry for human flesh. Unfortunately, this absurd and aimless chompfest can’t decide whether the…
Night Watch (Fox Searchlight) Every once in a while, Hollywood needs somebody else to steal a genre and totally reimagine it; it keeps old ideas young, like celluloid Botox. Well, Hollywood’s gonna need one big needle to absorb Night Watch, an insane, insanely cool Russian action/horror/sci-fi brew that’s like nothing…
“Annual Summer Juried Exhibition” at ASU Harry Wood Gallery: This year’s crop of MFA hopefuls shows a surprising awareness of domestic issues including water conservation, racial profiling and changing family values. Look for tongue-in-cheek political lampoons, like Exhibitions Class Award winner Corie J. Cole’s ceramic caricatures of cowboy Bush and…
Adventures of Superman: The Complete First Four Seasons (Warner Bros.) The Art of Erotic Dancing (BFS) Austin City Limits 2005 Music Festival (Image) Charlie Chan: Volume One (Fox) The Cult of the Suicide Bomber (The Disinformation Company) Eight Below (Disney) Equinox: The Criterion Collection (Criterion) A Fine Madness (Warner Bros.)…
All Aboard! Rosie’s Family Cruise (HBO) Aquamarine (Fox) Beavis and Butt-head: The Mike Judge Collection, Volume 2 (Paramount) Before the Fall (Picture This) The Betty Grable Collection: Volume 1 (Fox) Cemetery Man (Anchor Bay) End of the Spear (Fox) Fatwa (Ventura) A Good Woman (Lions Gate) Green Street Hooligans (Warner…
There is no movie more overrated in recent history than Napoleon Dynamite; it’s to cinema what The Doors are to rock and roll, a thing blindly and inexplicably championed as though it were a religion above being blasphemed by nonbelievers. And every time someone tries to explain its appeal –…
Remember what a fun couple Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves were in Speed? Well, forget that. In The Lake House, Warner Bros.’ slow and heavy kickoff to the summer romance season, Bullock and Reeves play the mopiest lovers to hit the big screen since Tony and Maria channeled Romeo and…
Given that John Singleton directed the second movie in the Fast and the Furious franchise, it makes a perverse kind of sense that Justin Lin would follow. Just as Singleton did with Boyz N the Hood, young Lin quickly made a name for himself with a powerful breakthrough film that…
Before I tell you why and how quickly you should go to see Nearly Naked Theater’s nearly perfect (and almost entirely clad!) production of The Who’s Tommy, I had better come clean: I don’t like modern dance. All that flailing and hopping and mimicking of shape and form; all that…
Gretchen Schermerhorn, 31, has opinions on everything, from the exploitation of women to animal abuse to globalization, and her art reflects her political leanings subtly and with humor. She won’t get in your face, but she will make you think. Her prints stimulate conversation, allowing her to poke fun at…
Gamers are so used to Mario that the fundamental weirdness of his exploits no longer raises an eyebrow: A dumpy Italian plumber journeys through a fairy-tale land, where turtles throw hammers, mushrooms bestow magic powers, and a kingly turtlebeast holds a princess captive. Where other videogame plots might have been…
Valley of the Dolls Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (Fox) Behold The Godfather and Godfather Part II of drag-queen cinema — two movies that provide the gateway to a lifetime of wig addiction. The films couldn’t be more different in temperament — the 1967 original is mile-high Hollywood kitsch,…
June 1969 Tommy, a double-album rock opera by The Who, is released. At first banned by the BBC and certain U.S. radio stations (probably because of the child abuse that features so prominently in its story), it eventually reaches #4 on the U.S. Billboard album charts and #2 in the…
Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: These adapted adventures feature music and lyrics by Roger Miller and a book by William Hauptman, but retain Mark Twain’s deeply moral depictions of the 19th-century social tapestry. Twain scholars probably don’t head for dinner theaters often, but those who do in this…
Black Hawk Down: Extended Cut (Sony) Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: The Ultimate Collector’s Edition (Fox) Charmed: The Complete Fifth Season (Paramount) Dumbo: Big Top Edition (Disney) Entourage: The Complete Second Season (HBO) The Fast and the Furious: Franchise Collection (Universal) Firewall (Warner Bros.) Garfield: The Movie — The…
Urban art is defined by the city that it represents. In a glorified cow town like Kansas City, the boring neon art installation at the top of the Sulgrave Building hints at the town’s sheltered nature. Works like Chris Ofili’s Holy Virgin Mary, a portrait of the Madonna adorned with…
In 1994, during a routine excavation at the site of Temple XIII in Palenque, Mexico, workers unearthed a pre-Columbian burial chamber containing the remains of a woman, cloaked in a heavy layer of powdered red pigment. They called her “The Red Queen.” Mexican-born artist Ricardo Mazal took more than 300…
Cars, the latest vehicle to roll off a Pixar assembly line that has thus far yielded nothing but spit-shined classics, answers that age-old question: What would Doc Hollywood have been like had it been populated entirely by, ya know, cars? If the promise of that particular premise — in which…
