Lotus Contemporary Art gallery is relocating to Scottsdale. Gallery owner and artist Denise Fleisch will reopen the space, previously located in the Roosevelt Row arts district of downtown Phoenix, on Thursday, October 6, with an exhibition titled “Unraveled” at 7077 Main Street #6. Lotus Contemporary Art, Five15 Arts, and Galleria…
The 2016 edition of New Times’ Best of Phoenix is out now,featuring a series of “as told to” profiles that explore how our city’s proximity to Mexico makes it better. I was born and raised in Hermosillo, the capital of Sonora, and moved to Phoenix 15 years ago. I never…
It’s absolutely possible to have too much of a good thing. During just a few short hours this Friday, October 7, well over a dozen new art exhibits are happening in downtown Phoenix. Sure, it’s theoretically possible to see them all. But you won’t have much fun if your Friday…
There’s little in the way of setup or explanation for what the “bad batch” is or how the members of such a motley, unfortunate tribe of humans were banished to a desert wasteland in Ana Lily Amirpour’s post-apocalyptic action dramedy. Instead, Amirpour just lets the camera linger on a sign…
I want to take a moment to apologize to Anne Hathaway. Ms. Hathaway, as you’ve grown from precocious princess (The Princess Diaries) and embattled intern (The Devil Wears Prada) to destitute prostitute (Les Misérables) and back again to Disney royalty (Alice Through the Looking Glass), I’ve sometimes judged you unfairly,…
The images are unsettling: photographs of moist, pink skin, stretched and bloated; rows of wet, shiny teeth glistening from a cavernous maw; clumps of straw-like blond hair bursting from the neck hole of a starched white shirt. Created by an anonymous Scottsdale artist, these digital montages are as troubling as…
The month before Fish Tank writer/director Andrea Arnold premiered her film American Honey at this year’s edition of the Cannes Film Festival (where it won the Jury Prize), she spoke before an audience with director Ira Sachs as part of the Tribeca Film Festival. The following are excerpts of her remarks, edited for clarity…
Forgiveness is tricky and personal, and you can’t be blamed for not offering it. Buying a ticket to Nate Parker’s slave-revolt drama The Birth of a Nation demands at least some measure of it. As you’ve probably heard, while a student at Penn State, Parker — the film’s star, director,…
When Relativity Media — the production company/distributor behind Masterminds, the newest vehicle for Zach Galifianakis to do his painfully committed schtick — started getting press, co-founder/co-CEO Ryan Kavanaugh boasted of his secret sauce for success. A proprietary risk-evaluation algorithm that crunched variables like cast, release date, relative examples in the…
Here’s a great example of how not to open your documentary. “After releasing my film in 2012 about marriage equality, I was at a loss of what topic to explore next,” says Cassie Jaye in the halting tones of a hostage reading her captors’ statement to the world. That comes…
They say there’s no accounting for taste, and here to prove it is The Greasy Strangler. A fringe-inhabiting genre provocation destined for a self-selecting audience with strong stomachs, co-writer/director Jim Hosking’s feature-length whatsit tests sensibilities, but Hosking forgets that oddity isn’t a substitute for quality. The film offers a chance…
Outside of dudes killing dudes, there’s little the moviegoers seem to love more than weddings, a truth that Elite Zexer’s heartsick desert drama Sand Storm exploits for a first-act sucker punch. The nuptials that teen Layla (Lamis Ammar) is driving her father Suliman (Hitham Omari) toward, the frame of a…
Voyage of Time: The IMAX Experience might be the most narrative film of Terrence Malick’s career. The enigmatic director’s recent work has been marked by a turn toward elliptical, stream-of-consciousness meditations, pretty much discarding any semblance of conventional storytelling. But going as far back as Badlands (1973), he’s had a…
You might have let yourself act surprised as the waters have risen and the floods have come. But you can’t anymore, not after 13th, Ava DuVernay’s miraculous cine-history of the criminalization of American blackness. Few films shake and astonish like this one, even though nothing in it should be a…
It takes all of two minutes of listening to Emily Blunt’s voice-over in The Girl on the Train before you have to wonder whether this narrator might be unreliable. As her Rachel rides Metro-North in and out of Manhattan, detailing her growing obsession with the ostensibly perfect couple she steals…
Half a century after its debut, The Battle of Algiers has a permanent parking spot in the film canon. After taking home the Golden Lion at the 1966 Venice Film Festival, it was nominated for three Academy Awards (one in 1967 and two in 1969, oddly) and now ranks within…
Mike Judge’s Idiocracy might technically be coming back to theaters for one night only, but for many of us, it’s been running on an endless loop for years. In a world where Donald Trump is a presidential candidate and some cafes are now offering blowjobs with your morning coffee, it’s…
The City of Phoenix has announced plans to remove 15 5-foot-tall planters that were installed on Roosevelt Street last summer. Part of a street improvement plan for the Roosevelt Row arts district in downtown Phoenix, the terracotta-colored planters hold trees intended to give shade. But the community wasn’t impressed. Leaders for…
As a new academic year got underway for ASU, the impact of ASU’s School of Art on the local arts scene was on full display — in galleries located not only on the Tempe campus, but in other arts spaces around metro Phoenix. Here’s a look at ten of the…
The 2016 edition of New Times’ Best of Phoenix is out now, featuring a series of “as told to” profiles that explore how our city’s proximity to Mexico makes it better. I tell people this all the time: I was forced into flamenco dancing. I was 9 years old, and…
Oh boy, the Cardinals. The Cardinals. Why do Arizona sports teams have to be so uniquely disappointing? The team has already lost two games at the University of Phoenix Stadium, and so far they’ve dropped games to the Boston Belichicks, Shady McCoy’s Traveling Orgy, and Jeff Fisher’s Mustache. Things aren’t looking…
Robrt Pela recently wrote about why Phoenix feels so white, despite its racial diversity. Here, he reflects on his experiences with whiteness, brownness, and what they mean in a place bordering Mexico. It’s August 28, 1976, my first day of high school. Mrs. Travis, our over-effusive third-period algebra instructor, has…
