CuratorFinding Pho’chella
M.V. MoorheadOctober 1, 2017
Phoenix finally has its own big-time, Coachella-style music festival. But is our live-music love deep enough to make Lost Lake a permanent fixture at Steele Indian School Park?
Food ReviewsFall Finds
M.V. MoorheadOctober 1, 2017
Discover a new neighborhood favorite with our Valleywide roundup of new restaurants.
Food ReviewsHoly Crêpe
M.V. MoorheadSeptember 1, 2017
Ooh la la! The Valley is verily stuffed with restaurants specializing in the ethereal French pancake.
Visual ArtsRural Route Fest: Compelling Environmental Film Shorts Come to Phoenix
M.V. MoorheadAugust 23, 2017
The next offering from Phoenix’s No Festival Required film series isn’t one movie, it’s nine little movies. “The Rural Route Film Festival Touring Program: Short Films and Animations” is a compilation of the best shorts from the New York-based fest, which features non-urban subjects from around the world, often focusing on environmental issues.
If this sounds like a depressing or guilt-inducing prospect, don’t despair. It’s a surprisingly lively, engaging collection, often distressing but non-didactic and free of scolding (e.g. it’s your fault we’re watching sad polar bears floating away on melting ice). The selections are highly diverse in style and tone, and yet there’s a recurrence of themes and images between them that gives the show unity. Two of the shorts, for instance, involve the mining industry’s use of ill-fated canaries, Jesse Kreitzer’s Iowa-filmed early-20th century period mining drama Black Canaries and Marie Schlingmann’s disturbing, ambiguous thriller Canary.
Valley food blogger Joanie Simon is about to make her Food Network debut – with Guy Fieri in tow, no less. But she’s not chowing down with the ebullient host at a drive-in, diner or dive. Instead, Fieri has her scurrying through the aisles of a grocery store.
Simon will appear on an episode of Guy’s Grocery Games, airing this Sunday, August 13, at 6 p.m. ET. For the uninitiated, the show features four chefs competing against each other in a grocery store set stocked with premium ingredients. In every 30-minute episode, each contestant shops for and prepares a dish, which is then judged. The last chef standing at the end gets two minutes to shop for items on a list, and wins a grand prize of $20,000 if he or she can find them all.
PHOENIX recently caught up with Simon, whose episode was shot last November, to talk about the stress of live food competition and whether Guy is really as wacky as he seems on TV.
Food ReviewsFreaky for Tzatziki
M.V. MoorheadAugust 1, 2017
It’s a pita jungle out there. Find the latest in Mediterranean cuisine with this Valleywide roundup.
Near the beginning of Pamela Tom’s documentary Tyrus, the painter Tyrus Wong, who died last year at the age of 106, explains that his Chinese name, Gen Yo, translates to something like “Buena Vista” in Spanish. The view from his eyes seems, indeed, to have been beautiful.
Food ReviewsLet’s Talk Tacos
M.V. MoorheadJuly 1, 2017
So many crunchy, savory, spicy discs of deliciousness, so few hours in the day.
Being all alone in the world – that's the theme of The Quiet Earth. But I don’t mean that figuratively. Zac (Bruno Lawrence), the hero of this 1985 film from New Zealand showing at 6 p.m. this Sunday, June 4, at Film Bar Phoenix, suddenly finds himself seemingly the only person left alive on Earth after a science project-gone-wrong.
Food ReviewsEastern Delicacies
M.V. MoorheadJune 1, 2017
Grounded snowbirds, take heed: We’ve got your home-state favorites right here.
At the beginning of the documentary "Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent," which opens in the Valley Friday at Harkins Shea, the handsome old title character pads around what appear to be ancient Mexican ruins with a funereal look on his face, morosely contemplating the failure of the world to live up to his standards of perfection. But Tower is not a disillusioned political or religious idealist, not a diplomat whose plans for world peace have been ignored.
Food ReviewsHello Again
M.V. MoorheadMay 1, 2017
We circle back to review a Valleywide selection of reboots and second acts.
HistoryRe-Raising Arizona
M.V. MoorheadApril 1, 2017
Thirty years after its release, the Coen brothers-directed crime caper survives as a wildly entertaining – if vaguely infuriating – piece of Valley cultural taxonomy.
Food ReviewsSushi Con Gusto
M.V. MoorheadApril 1, 2017
What happens when Southwestern and Japanese culinary traditions go on a hot date? Mexican sushi.
Food ReviewsChop to It
M.V. MoorheadMarch 1, 2017
Bone up on the latest steakhouse offerings with this Valleywide roundup.