We’re used to seeing dancing vampires this time of year, thanks to A Vampire Tale choreographed by Lisa Starry for her Scorpius Dance Theatre. Now Valley audiences can also enjoy the première of a new Starry work titled Fade, which is part of The Bad and The Beautiful program for…
Muralist J.B. Snyder has been teasing us all week. His vague social media posts on Instagram and Facebook seem to say one thing: Snyder will be opening The Allery to the public tonight at 7 p.m. with a multi-artist show entitled “Opening Day.” The Allery is set to be an…
Every year, the biggest names in sneakers put out iconic colorways of their signature shoes, just in time for Halloween. Some may be a simple combination of black and orange while others feature ornate designs related to the annual day celebrating ghouls, goblins, and candy. Here are our five favorite…
From the East Valley to the West Valley, central and beyond, altars, sugar skulls, live music, and processions will be popping up all over metro Phoenix to celebrate Dia de Los Muertos. Here are seven events to look out for over the next couple weekends…
Seminar Writers are fun people (trust us), but we might be at our best one on one. In Theresa Rebeck’s play Seminar, five writers convene in a Manhattan apartment. One is renowned author Leonard, a teacher whom each of the others has paid $5000 to, no surprise, verbally abuse them…
Cherrie Moraga’s The Hungry Woman debuted on the ASU Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts’ mainstage last weekend. The play, set in a post-Revolutionary, futuristic Phoenix, is a modernized retelling of the tragedy of Medea. Native and Mexican themes and folklore are integrated into the story, which also explores…
The Movement Source Dance Company returns for a second year with The Danse Macabre, an hourlong mash-up of dance, music, and illusion in the spirit of Halloween. It’s being performed at both Willo North Gallery and Crescent Ballroom, thanks to some decidedly undead hustle by Mary Anne Fernandez-Herding, founder and…
We’re not opposed to dressing up in couples’ costumes, but every year, there are some couples who insist on wearing terrible costumes together. Personally, we think it’s best to play it safe if you’re going to be a couple, and just be police officers or lumberjacks or something more generic…
Note: All events take place on Friday, October 31, unless otherwise specified. SPECIAL EVENTS Alwun House 1204 E. Roosevelt St. www.alwunhouse.org As if you wouldn’t have guessed by the enormous, creepy-looking daddy longlegs spider perched in the front yard, Halloween is sort of a big deal at the Alwun House…
Jake Gyllenhaal is used to exhaustion. During his research for the LAPD drama End of Watch, he spent five months patrolling the streets with real-life police officers until 7 a.m. It was good preparation for his new movie Nightcrawler, a blistering portrait of a morally corrupt crime-scene videographer who works…
Seeing a living legend laid up in an oxygen tent shouldn’t be fun. But in Alan Hicks’ doc Keep On Keepin’ On, it somehow is. Now in his 90s, diabetic and facing the possible amputation of a leg, the great jazz trumpeter Clark Terry lies there jamming. He doesn’t have…
Director Laura Poitras’s Citizenfour boasts an hour or so of tense, intimate, world-shaking footage you might not quite believe you’re watching. Poitras shows us history as it happens, scenes of such intimate momentousness that the movie’s a must-see piece of work even if, in its totality, it’s underwhelming as argument…
The 40th anniversary may mean ruby for the married folk, but for old town Scottsdale it means canvas, ceramics, photographs, and, well, you get the idea. For two score, as Lincoln might put it, Scottsdale’s historic downtown has been hosting its free community artwalk, and this fall it’s looking to…
If we had a nickel for every time someone started the sentence, “The first rule of fight club…,” we’d be able to fill up a truckload of coin wrappers and use them to plant punches right on each of their slack jaws. See, we freaking love Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club,…
You’re probably familiar with Bam Margera from the various stunts he’s pulled with his gang of jackasses on MTV’s Jackass. There’s also that TV show of his own called Viva La Bam, where you got to see a group of grown-ass men act like petulant little shits. In what is…
Jake Gyllenhaal, not a particularly bulky guy to begin with, dropped 20 pounds or so to play a Los Angeles misfit who finds his calling as a freelance crime videographer in Dan Gilroy’s nervy thriller Nightcrawler. Even when Robert De Niro does it, weight change isn’t acting — it’s the…
Let’s get this out of the way now: Kristen Stewart is fine in Camp X-Ray, the tough-minded/soft-hearted drama that packs America’s sweetheart off to Guantánamo Bay. The fact that such casting seems unlikely might be part of why she succeeds. Tasked with patrolling a cellblock of detainees for 12 hours…
Ruben Östlund makes films the way sociologists devise thought experiments: by posing a hypothesis and thinking fully through its consequences. The Swedish director’s previous feature, 2011’s Play, follows a group of black teenagers in Gothenburg as they blithely coerce a trio of affluent white children to hand over their valuables…
Alexandre Aja’s Horns is the rare YA-ish romance that doesn’t make like a guidance counselor and force the characters to shake hands and forgive. It’s a biblically tinged, eye-for-an-eye vengeance thriller about an emo boyfriend named Ig (Daniel Radcliffe) whose childhood sweetheart Merrin (Juno Temple) has been murdered underneath the…
Getting up on stage and reading something you wrote is not an easy thing to do; making it entertaining is even harder. Luckily, there’s Lit Lounge. Hosted monthly at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, this award-winning story-performing series fuses writers and performers sharing true stories with live music. On Friday,…
Penn & Teller have had the longest running magic show in Las Vegas for good reason. The duo isn’t as corny as Criss Angel, and their performance combines comedy, suspense, and political discourse in the best possible way. Sure, the libertarian and atheist rants can get a little tiring, but…
In The Walking Dead, the so-called survivors sure kill a lot of zombies. Don’t you ever feel for them? We mean, the walkers are just trying to get by like anybody else in this crazy world. It’s not their fault they love the taste of human flesh and brains. You…
