New Zealand’s Cliff Curtis has been stealing scenes for years now, so it’s nice to see him playing a bona-fide lead in the new chess drama The Dark Horse. Based on the life of Genesis Potini, a bipolar Maori chess champion, the film follows a coach and a group of…
Between Stephenie Meyer and Diana Gabaldon, Phoenix has produced a pair of writing superstars who dominate the charts with everything they release. You may not like sparkly vampires or kilted Scottish lovers, but there is no denying the impact these two authors have had on speculative fiction. But Phoenix also…
A priest, a rabbi, a Buddhist monk, and the world’s first African American Surgeon General appear in a documentary called Sticky: A (Self) Love Story. And don’t worry about your mind being in the gutter, because it totally is about masturbation. The concept is simple: Nicholas Tana – an Arizona State University…
In the first scene of this three-act play — call it Who’s Afraid of Alternative Theater? or maybe Revenge of Master Ronald and the Boys — we find thespian game-changer Ron May standing in the dusty courtyard of a big, shiny, downtown playhouse. Circled by a small group of well-wishers, he is smoking…
A she-wolf of Wall Street with a spiky ginger Suze Orman shag, Michelle Darnell, the anti-heroine of fitfully funny The Boss, is the latest of the Rabelaisian wonders played by Melissa McCarthy. The actress specializes in characters with indestructible bravado, no matter where they stand on the socioeconomic ladder; Michelle,…
And they keep on coming: After the international critical and commercial breakthroughs of Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation and The Past, Fireworks Wednesday represents the second of his earlier films to receive a belated U.S. release. As was the case with About Elly — made in 2009 but given a stateside…
Scottsdale Desert Stages Theatre is moving to the former Harkins Fashion Square 7 movie theater location inside Scottsdale Fashion Square. The nonprofit theatrical group, which has been located at 4720 North Scottsdale Road since 2004, announced the news on Monday, April 4. “We are delighted to announce our plans to move into such a prominent…
Spring is usually a cinematic wasteland. Oscar season is almost a year away, and the glut of bloated summer action flicks hasn’t started its assault on our senses (Batman v. Superman aside). The Phoenix Film Festival fills in the gaps, in the best ways possible, starting on Thursday, April 7, with…
All season, I’ve been counting the weeks until Arizona Theatre Company’s production of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, which opened on Saturday and runs through mid-April. Despite my anticipation, I was not, by and large, disappointed. Steinbeck wrote the adaption of his 1937 novella that same year, when it…
A fractured film about a fractured family, Louder Than Bombs takes a potentially tired premise and reshapes it before our eyes. It opens on a newborn’s tiny hand helplessly clinging to a father’s finger, and ends with a different father watching his two sons sleep. In between is a story…
Clowning, bullet-riddled rom-com Mr. Right is awfully charming in the best and worse sense of the phrase. It’s often kind of awful but also weirdly, effervescently charming, a movie that salves, with its stars’ radiance and charisma, even as it grates. What hurts: lots of vaguely comic hitman drama, with…
“‘Shaken-baby syndrome’ is in the realm of mythology,” says neurosurgeon Ayub Ommaya in archival footage featured in the documentary The Syndrome. Yet it was Ommaya’s research on monkeys in the 1960s upon which law enforcement and a few medical experts built the shaken-baby syndrome hysteria-industrial complex — a fact he…
Jean-Marc Vallée’s Demolition presents an interesting experiment: What if you told a story of tragedy but withheld all the tenderness and emotion from it, so that you were left — at least until the very end — with just literal and figurative wreckage, disconnected fragments seeking to be put back…
April’s First Friday in Phoenix was bustling as people descended on downtown to check out the latest Fortoul Brothers show in their 40 Owls pop-up gallery, hit a MOD-AZ show at Chartreuse that helped to usher in Modern Phoenix Week, and explore shoes decked out in everything from rhinestones to…
New Times picks the best things to do from Monday, April 4, to Thursday, April 7. The Circus Let us blow your mind: For 16 years, GateWay Community College has shared its film program with the general public a couple of times a year. In tandem with the Valley of the…
When Roosevelt Row landed on the radar of the Arizona Legislature earlier this year, it seemed like everyone knew (or thought they knew) what was best for the area, which is recognized as one of the country’s top neighborhoods and art districts. The Phoenix City Council voted on January 20 to…
In an urban landscape dominated by billboards, fast food signs, and other uninspiring fare, it’s nice to stumble on a nice work of public art now and then. Public art reminds us that there’s more to life than logos and taglines. And the Valley just happens to be one of…
Superhero fans may not know stunt coordinator Philip J Silvera’s name, but they do know his work. Silvera’s choreography turned heads in such recent comic-book adaptations as the Arkham Knight and Arkham Origins Batman video games, the record-breaking Deadpool film and Netflix’s Daredevil. Silvera’s imaginative, brutal work on Daredevil’s first…
Each week, we’re recapping the first season of Fuller House, episode by episode. Time to make some volcanos erupt. Up until this point, our main grievance with Fuller House has been the preemptively desperate cameos of the Elder Tanners. This was most notable in the last episode, when Joey traveled…
Sometimes in fantasy novels, less is more. Sure, there’s nothing like getting lost in a series of 10 or 20 books filled with magic and wonder. But it’s also nice not devoting the better part of a year to finishing them. Which makes Brian Staveley’s “Chronicles of the Unhewn Throne”…
Nail art may be today’s mosaic, and nail artists the new impressionists. We may be a tad dramatic, but just take a look at nail artist Sarah Waite of Chalkboard Nails. Go there now; we’ll give you a minute. Impressive, we know. Years ago, Waite was browsing the Internet at…
New Times picks the best events and things to do in metro Phoenix from April 1 through 3. “Alley Art” The First Friday art scene has a habit of overflowing from galleries to doorsteps and stoops, and eventually into streets and vacant lots. Now a new monthly show, “Alley Art,” has…
