On a recent Saturday morning, a crew of aging former professional soccer players from Latin America huddled around Salvador Lopez, who drilled them on the strategy of how their...
Jazz bassist Marcus Shelby is a composer, bandleader, and Bay Area educator. He combines these talents on the magnum opus Harriet Tubman, a two-CD orchestral tribute to the...
Pop music is "anything that connects to a lot of people at the same time, that deals with what's going on when it's made," says Swedish singer-songwriter Robin Carlsson, better...
As you walk through the crowded city, past hordes of tourists patiently lined up to board tiny trolleys, drive down a twisty street, or board a boat to visit a rocky,...
About a thousand movies ago, I made the truculent, unprovable assertion that if Chinese grandmaster Hou Hsiao-hsien were French, he'd be a household name. Now the moment of...
Converting a fondly remembered cartoon series into a prospective franchise, the Matrix masters, Larry and Andy Wachowski, have taken another step toward the total...
British plantation owner and colonialist extraordinaire Henry Moores (Linus Roache) fancies himself the cowboy of Kerala, cavorting around the jungle with his Indian mistress,...
The extraordinary Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, more comfortably known as "that abortion movie that won the 2007 Palme d'Or," sheds its secrets slowly. It's a...
Pete Ippel is a modern exponent of a long-standing tradition: the bro artist. Think of athlete-philosophers like Jack Kerouac, Richie Tenenbaum, both Jack Johnsons, or Muhammad...
Nick Broomfield, known for his unseemly documentary portraits of Aileen Wuornos, Heidi Fleiss, and Courtney Love, brings a surprising dose of compassion to his third dramatic...
Leaving Heather Has Two Mommies in the dust, the Trans Community Picnic is a big party for families who are more honest than most. We're pretty sure all families have members...
In 1986, the Bay to Breakers held the Guinness Book of World Records title World's Largest Footrace, with 110,000 participants. That many of them were drunk, high, naked, and...
Ask any beat cop or ex-boyfriend -- no two people view the same event identically. Add a few years and you'll get a few more versions of the story. So what of a tale that has...
You think you already know whether you like Indian classical dance, don't you? Whatever else you're pondering, whatever other traditional-art-based conundrums haunt you, you've...
In their dubious quest to appease every last parent from the Bible Belt to Berkeley, the namby-pambies at Pixar, Disney, and other studios have forgotten that fairy tales are...
Eight months ago, Mark Weil, the director of Ilkhom Theatre, was murdered in the Uzbeki capital of Tashkent. Many believe that Weil was killed for ideological reasons ...
The parallels between artists David Choong Lee and Mars-1 may not be immediately apparent. Choong Lee's work is decidedly urban, from his unambiguous though compassionate...
The question of whether James Frey received redemption could not be answered by press time, for Frey's new publisher, HarperCollins, did not send us his first novel, Bright...
For more than a decade, Killing My Lobster has been the anchor that keeps our local sketch comedy scene from sailing into irrelevancy. But its members have also been charting a...
In a perfect world, the revival of Philippe Garrel's 1991 pinnacle J'entends plus la guitare (I Don't Hear the Guitar Anymore) would warrant more than a two-night stand. (It...