Arts & Culture

Except for Arizona as a setting, the current film Broken Arrow has little in common with the like-titled movie of 1950, that wonderful James Stewart-Jeff Chandler Western directed by Delmer Daves. The only other point of agreement might be their inversion of the reactionary values of their respective genres–Daves’ film…

It doesn’t take long for Actors Theatre of Phoenix to offend women, the religious, conspiracy theorists and believers in extraterrestrials during its current production of Some Things You Need to Know Before the World Ends (A Final Evening With the Illuminati). Coming across like a bad version of The Hunchback…

Georgia has been racking up the raves, and I wish I could more wholeheartedly join in. There’s no disputing that it has some forceful, occasionally even harrowing, passages, or that the performances of its lead actresses are very fine at times. But there’s something too self-assured about the film–the central…

As with Philadelphia and Salvador, the title of director Michael Hoffman’s film Restoration is meant to have a double meaning. The setting of the film is England during the 1660s–the Restoration period. But the film is also about the restoration of the hero’s soul. Said hero is Robert Merivel (Robert…

Chances are you’ve never heard of John Pierson, but if you make a point of reading the Film section, chances are you’d enjoy his book. Pierson has spent the last decade working in the independent-film industry, under the job title “producer’s representative.” This roughly translates as “the guy who gets…

The novel Cry, the Beloved Country, written by a white South African schoolteacher named Alan Paton, was published in 1948, the year apartheid became official in South Africa. The story concerns two elderly fathers, one Zulu and one white, who become linked by tragedy–the former’s son is charged with the…

With the exception of the Western, the vampire movie may just be the most durable of all genres. It’s produced everything from cinematic masterpieces like Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932) and F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) to indelible pop-culture classics like Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) to lesser interpretations without number. Just…

Sometimes it’s difficult to decide which is more annoying–a fluffy Brit period piece or a depressing Brit period piece. Carrington, to its credit, isn’t fluff. It’s a tough, solid piece of work, intelligently written and directed by Christopher Hampton. It’s also excellently acted. In most respects, it’s hard to fault…

Writer-director Tim Robbins’ Dead Man Walking is about a man awaiting execution, and the suffering and hope and reconciliation connected to his crime. The heroine, Sister Helen Prejean (Susan Sarandon), is a New Orleans nun who counsels Matthew Poncelet (Sean Penn), a death-row inmate at Angola State Prison. Despite a…