It’s understandable that Eldridge Cleaver would consider Panther “a travesty.” Cleaver, who in the ’60s was minister of information for the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, is a character in director Mario Van Peebles’ new film, and he doesn’t come off especially well. He’s presented as a hothead who can’t…
John Sayles has been making movies for quite a while now, but making them less as a director and more as a screenwriter who directs. His interests are impressively wide, his plots are imaginative, his characters often complex, his dialogue pungent and funny. But his films, though never inept, are…
Last year, I reviewed a film called Go Fish, allegedly a comedy, about modern life among urban twentysomething lesbians. I panned it, and, predictably, got some static from lesbian readers who suggested that I disliked the film because I wasn’t a lesbian myself, and not for the actual reason, which…
After a modest first try last year, Arizona Film Society has taken the next step toward the elusive goal of bringing a regular annual film festival to the Valley–it’s come back for a second year. Saguaro Film Festival II will be held Thursday through Sunday at AMC Town & Country…
Long before Spike Lee and John Singleton made their first films, African-American cinema had had a 50-year history as an alternative genre that few people, even film buffs, knew about. Made independently by African-American directors for African-American audiences, “race films” flourished from after World War I until the late 1940s,…
Stephen Sondheim’s most sublime achievements surpass anything in the musical theatre since Rodgers and Hammerstein. I would include among these Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street; Sunday in the Park With George; and his most recent, the controversial Passion. Still pretty good, if not of the first rank,…
There’s not a bat in sight in the world premiäre of Arizona Theatre Company’s compelling new version of Dracula, currently stalking Herberger Theater Center. But bats are about the only thing missing from Steven Dietz’s faithful rendition of Bram Stoker’s 1897 tale of horror. ATC commissioned Dietz, author of this…
Destiny Turns On the Radio is the unfortunate title of a small, strange, rather agreeable comic fantasy set in Las Vegas. The title cosmic force, personified by Quentin Tarantino as a flashy hipster with a shit-eating grin, finds Julian (Dylan McDermott), an escaped convict, wandering in the Nevada desert and…
Jim Carroll’s book The Basketball Diaries isn’t about basketball, it’s about how the diarist, a Catholic high school kid growing up in Manhattan, happened to quit basketball. It’s an autobiographical work, supposedly the real diary Carroll kept during the mid-Sixties, when he changed from an aspiring poet and star of…
Director Henry Hathaway’s 1947 Kiss of Death isn’t necessarily a great crime movie, but it has remained in our collective movie memory for two reasons: Richard Widmark and New York City. The film was shot entirely on location, a practice that’s now de rigueur, but was unusual enough at the…
If Marcel Duchamp, Pieter Brueghel and Franz Kafka had somehow been commissioned to build a playroom for disenchanted philosophers, it may have looked a lot like deCompression Satellite Gallery does right now. The Arizona Center gallery is presenting the work of Bay Area sculptor Bella Feldman in an exhibition titled…
The sensational story of Medea has fascinated audiences throughout time. Corneille wrote a version in 1635, and Cherubini turned it into an opera in 1797. Broadway has produced this play more often (and more successfully) than any other classic. Dame Judith Anderson won a Tony Award as Best Actress in…
Once Were Warriors, a contemporary drama about a Maori family living in an urban New Zealand slum, is the feature debut of director Lee Tamahori. To describe the film with the usual adjectives–“raw,” “powerful,” “hard-hitting”–would be accurate, and then some. The theme of the film is domestic violence, and Tamahori…
Frequent moviegoers tend to develop pretty sharp instincts about what to see and what to avoid, and they’re often right. As soon as one sees that a feature vehicle has been made for a popular sketch character from Saturday Night Live, the review starts writing itself in one’s head–“What’s funny…
Thomas Jefferson was a great American statesman–probably the greatest–and Nick Nolte is a superb American movie star. What a shame that the collaboration of these two estimable men–Nolte plays Jefferson in Jefferson in Paris, the new movie by producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory–is so utterly dull. About the…
In 1977, a very lean year for drama, The Shadow Box won the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award, but lost the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award to David Mamet’s American Buffalo. “Disease plays” were fashionable then, but about this one, critics were divided. The more intellectual of them…
The best play of 1966 has arrived in Phoenix, and even 29 years later, it is still the most outrageous comedy of the season. It’s also one of the funniest. The play is Joe Orton’s Loot, in a production by Tres Repertory Theatre in Park Central Mall. Now half-deserted, this…
Priest is a movie with a message, and in spite of a complicated–perhaps overly complicated–plot, that message is a simple one: The Catholic Church should give up its doctrine of priestly celibacy. If Church hierarchy refuses to do this, individual priests should ignore the doctrine as they see fit. I’ve…
A Goofy Movie is more-traditional Disney than Priest, but the plot is no less perennial. It’s about being estranged from, and embarrassed by, your parents. Or, in this case, parent–Goofy is a single father here, and the film is a road comedy in which he tries to reconnect with his…
Art Detour, the yearly open house of downtown Phoenix art studios and galleries, came and went this year without much fanfare. No trolleys to shuttle folks along the circuit of art spaces, no “mystery” galleries (empty downtown storefronts turned into art spaces for the event), no juried exhibition. In other…
If Forrest Gump’s mother was right (“Life is like a box of . . .”), then Arizona Comedy Theatre Company’s Coming Attractions is like a Whitman’s Sampler with all the tops pushed in so we know what we’re going to get. Four dedicated performers have put themselves on display with…
Liam Neeson is a fine big slab of testosterone, a competent actor and a reasonably likable screen presence. He’s not, however, a movie star. He may be paid like a movie star, he may be given starring roles, but the excitement, the sense of intimacy that a true movie star…
