Manhattanites Unite

Please Give doles out just the right touch

Whiny, self-absorbed urban yuppies? Yes, please! Especially if the director doing the ethnographic surveying is the shaggy-cool Nicole Holofcener, who invests her characters with just the right balance of annoying quirks and squishy humanity to make them watchable—if not exactly lovable.

SFR Talk: The Set Up Man

With Paul Horpedahl

Each summer, the Santa Fe Opera puts on 38 different performances of five shows. Paul Horpedahl is the SFO’s understated production director.

Loose Lips

There’s no secret to this everyday crime drama

Benjamin Esposito (Ricardo Dar'n) is at the end of his professional career as a court investigator, but remains haunted by one case. In 1974, he was assigned to investigate the vicious rape and murder of a lovely young woman, Liliana Coloto. It is a crime that has stuck with him for 25 years.

Diving in the Desert

My dive buddy, a German road tripper Id met 10 minutes before descending, gave me the OK signal with his hand and smiled through his regulator. We continued upward along the perimeter of the Blue Hole, where other dollar-store toys dotted the walls. Except for a handful of skittish crawfish, there was nothing else to see.

Having Fun

Head to the ballpark for an afternoon of family-friendly fun

Capital H, capital F. With parenthood comes the responsibility (and the desire) to Have Fun with one’s children—especially in the summertime. Each sunny, school-free day seems like an opportunity to either fill in that blank with Fun or have another black mark placed next to your name in the Dud Parent category.

Cut it Down

Splice puts a little too much together

How do we account, Splice asks, for the kindred dorkdom of lab-cloistered scientists and monster-movie completists? Are we talking nature or nurture here?

Accidental Wilderness

In the West, a legacy of nuclear contamination has created lands that are both poisoned and pristine.

On a clear day with only a slight breeze, Heidi Newsome walked up a canyon seeking signs of the rare ferruginous hawk, so named for the rusty hue of its feathers. In a week, pink phlox would carpet the undulating desert landscape below Rattlesnake Mountain, followed soon after by a rush of violet lupine. Mother Nature hasn’t always received that kind of respect in these parts.

Game Over

Did video games kill the movie star?

It would be easy to go into Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time believing cinema is dead—and even easier to believe after coming out of it.

Foursquare

The Square has just the right number of angles

We moviegoers can be such assholes. It’s not enough to project our shabby selves into so many better-looking lives. Just as often, apparently, we need to sit back in the dark doing nothing while other less clever souls plod haplessly toward their own doom.

Robbing Whom?

Something is missing in Robin Hood

It’s true: There is no reason for another Robin Hood movie. But of course the Hollywood tradition of Robin Hood movies is to keep making them anyway. So here’s Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood, another of the director’s bloated vehicles for the battle-action Russell Crowe.