Arts & Entertainment Mary Zimmerman's <i>Treasure Island</i> At Berkeley Rep Is A Dazzling And Smart Adventure Ride Director and playwright Mary Zimmerman is something of a legend at Berkeley Rep, having brought her stunning Metamorphoses there in 1999 before going on to win a Tony Award for direction after taking
Arts & Entertainment Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangsta (Kitten): <i>Keanu</i>, Reviewed In 2014 Keanu Reeves starred in a movie called John Wick, which was essentially two hours of Keanu killing gangsters because they killed his puppy. It's a good movie, but a hell of
Arts & Entertainment <i>The Lion</i> At ACT's Strand Theater Is A Deeply Moving Musical Marvel Ben Scheuer is a natural born storyteller who was given a traumatic story to tell: his own. He lost his father at the age of 13, and at 28 he was diagnosed with
Arts & Entertainment Shotgun Players' <i>Hamlet</i> (With Roulette Casting) Is A Meta Dive Into Shakespeare's Most Lyrical Tragedy If I describe to you the premise of Berkeley-based Shotgun Players' new season-opening production of Hamlet, you're likely going to write it off as some sort of stunt, and the Shakespeare purists might
Arts & Entertainment Nazi Punks Must Die: <i>Green Room</i>, Reviewed Having white supremacist skinheads as the villains in a horror movie seems like such an obvious idea, I’m surprised I haven’t seen it done before. (And before you scream Surf Nazis
Arts & Entertainment Zero Fun: <em>Criminal</em>, Reviewed Criminal is an utterly ridiculous action movie with a central premise straight out of a 1950's B-horror movie, although that makes it sound like a lot more fun than it actually is, which
Arts & Entertainment SFist At The Movies: Demolition, The Boss, Miles Ahead Demolition - Everywhere Demolition is an odd movie that attempts to wrench emotions out of its audience, but left me feeling about as numb as its hero. Jake Gyllenhaal stars as Davis Mitchell,
Arts & Entertainment 'An Act Of God' Starring Sean Hayes Is A Smart, Mostly Light-Hearted Take On The Maker Sean Hayes the performer is not to be confused with the character of Jack McFarland on Will & Grace that he's blessed (or doomed) to be branded with as his career-defining role. And
Arts & Entertainment SFist At The Movies: <em>Everybody Wants Some!!</em>, <em>Born To Be Blue</em>, <em>I Saw The Light</em>, <em>Midnight Special</em> Richard Linklater's Everybody Wants Some!! is being billed as a "spiritual sequel" to his breakout 1993 movie Dazed and Confused, and that makes sense. Both take place in a Texas of days-gone-by, and
Arts & Entertainment Thank God For Wonder Woman: <em>Batman V Superman</em> Is A Colossal Waste Of Time Batman Vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice is not so much a movie as it is an extended warning: You comic book movie fans better like this, because there's going to be a hell
Arts & Entertainment 'The Realistic Joneses' Is A Realistic Portrayal Of The Awkwardness Of Illness, And Also Not Just open as of last night at ACT, The Realistic Joneses by Will Eno is a sometimes difficult, awkwardly funny, and starkly modern play that delves into the lives of two couples suffering
Arts & Entertainment 'Wicked' Returns To SF, Is Still A Lot Of Fun Wicked, the 10th longest-running musical on Broadway, has returned to San Francisco for the first time since 2013. But Wicked and San Francisco have a long history, as it was here that the
Arts & Entertainment SFist At The Movies: 10 Cloverfield Lane, The Knight of Cups, The Brothers Grimsby 10 Cloverfield Lane - Everywhere 10 Cloverfield Lane arrived almost out of the blue, with a trailer dropping before anyone even knew the movie existed. Since it was produced by J.J. Abrams
Arts & Entertainment SFist At The Movies: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, London Has Fallen, Zootopia Whiskey Tango Foxtrot - Everywhere Tina Fey's second movie in three months is more serious than Sisters was, but I found myself liking it more. One of the issues I had with Sisters
Arts & Entertainment 'Macbeth' At Berkeley Rep Is A Quiet Triumph For Frances McDormand I'm never fully on board with productions of Shakespeare that offer little in the way of visual or conceptual updates to The Bard's 400-year-old dialogue and poetry much like I have no patience
Arts & Entertainment Someone Should Put 'Dirty Dancing: The Classic Story On Stage' In A Corner I was never a huge fan of the movie Dirty Dancing, mainly because its mix of period pop and contemporary songs always bugged the hell out of me, and its story was a
Arts & Entertainment SFist At The Movies: Gods Of Egypt, Eddie The Eagle, Triple 9 Gods of Egypt - Everywhere See a bunch of mostly white dudes playing ancient Egyptian deities in this CGI-filled epic that I totally thought was a video game when I first saw the
Arts & Entertainment 'The Unfortunates' At A.C.T.'s Strand Theater Is A Brash, Messy, Genre-Bending Musical For A New Age In what's arguably the first piece of gutsy, experimental theater to hit the stage at A.C.T.'s Strand Theater the ostensible mission of which is to provide space for more experimental
Arts & Entertainment SFist At The Movies: The Witch, Race, IndieFest The Witch - Alamo Drafhouse and the AMC Theaters The Witch is a tough sell. While it has both the creepiest and most beautiful imagery I've seen in a horror movie in many
Arts & Entertainment 'Aubergine' at Berkeley Rep Is A Melancholy, Food-Obsessed Look At Death Julia Cho's new play Aubergine, a world premiere that also marks the first production in the newly rechristened Peet's Theatre, is a thoughtful and fairly traditional play centered on two essential aspects of
Arts & Entertainment SFist At The Movies: Deadpool, Zoolander 2, How To Be Single Deadpool - Everywhere Your ability to enjoy Deadpool is directly predicated on how much you enjoy the entire Ryan Reynolds thing, by which I mean that whole smartass-with-the-shit-eating grin persona he's been working
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: Taylor Mac's 'A 24-Decade History Of Popular Music' At The Curran To call the art of Taylor Mac ambitious is an understatement, and maybe even an insult. In one of his last outings as a performer in SF in 2011, Mac brought his extravagant
Arts & Entertainment SFist At The Movies: The 5th Wave, Dirty Grandpa, The Lady In The Van, Noir City The 5th Wave - Everywhere AKA, The Hunger Games with Aliens. The world is on the verge of complete destruction by aliens, and only Chloe Grace Moretz and a bunch of teenagers can
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: <em>Satchmo At The Waldorf</em> The best moments in Satchmo at the Waldorf come when the audience at the American Conservatory Theater is cast as the crowd at the Waldorf Astoria of the play's title. "White people don't
Arts & Entertainment SFist At The Movies: Ride Along 2, Norm Of The North, Bowie At The Castro 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi - Everywhere If you think this will be a realistic, fact-based, and sober look into the events that occurred at that diplomatic compound in Libya on
