In case the season has you feeling shamefully joyous, here’s a stark little oasis of misery to remind you that America sometimes sucks and its denizens aren’t all heroes. Featuring painstaking attention to the copious warts of this big, proud country, Monster’s Ball moseys down South to issue the staggering…
Part comedy, part tragedy and all bite, No Man’s Land damns and mocks in equal measure, painting a picture of war’s absurdity that should make peaceniks of us all but likely won’t. Although set in the former Yugoslavia during the Bosnian-Serbian war, the movie transcends its geographic borders: Bosnian-born writer-director…
If they teach the work of Todd Solondz someday, assuming he’s not already in the curriculum somewhere, the lectures are bound to be rather short. To grasp the material without actually attending, just bone up on a little bargain-basement Freud, a whiff of primal therapy and a sprinkle of Jerry…
Though he takes a beating early on, watching his wife and son die in an embassy bombing carried out by Marxist, drug-running Colombian terrorists, it isn’t long before Arnold Schwarzenegger is striding through the jungles of Colombia as if on a Stairmaster, ignoring admonitions that to do so is “frickin’…
A bland, obnoxious 88-minute infomercial for Universal Studios and its ancillary products, chief among them birthday boy E.T. (due for re-release this spring) and the studio tour, this is a kids film for children who won’t shut up; it’s loud enough to be heard over the deafening chatter of restless…
This epic series of 10 hour-long films, each based on one of the Ten Commandments, finishes up with a rare note of whimsy. But first Kieslowski revs up the emotional wringer one last time for episode IX, “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife,” in which a doctor must face…
When Joe Quesada, writer and illustrator of comic books, went to work as a freelance contractor for Marvel Comics three years ago, he found the so-called House of Ideas in ruin. The comic-book industry was, as Quesada recalls, “going down the toilet”: Every month, 10 to 15 percent of readers…
Remember when going to the theater felt like an escape from television? Great live theater once offered what so much prime-time TV did not: casts of fascinating characters saying magical, poetic, sometimes shocking lines of dialogue penned by bold young playwrights who wrangled with complex, provocative messages in their work…
Most people don’t watch Jennifer Lopez to check out how accurate her flamenco dance steps are. We doubt they even notice her feet. Still, Dallas flamenco dancer and promoter Julia Alcántara believes anything–even a scantily clad pop singer–that draws attention to the ancient and constantly maturing Spanish gypsy art is…
The members of Monty Python knew that humor could be a great teaching tool in getting across serious ideas, such as when Eric Idle explained the ways of the galaxy in song during the film The Meaning of Life: “The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding/In all of the…
You’ve got to hand it to any romantic comedy that makes The Mexican and the Sweet November remake seem like enduring classics, which appears to be the chief objective of Birthday Girl. This slipshod sophomore effort from Jez Butterworth (Mojo) has been sitting on the shelf since its original release…
Despite an energetic performance from Rushmore’s Jason Schwartzman and a flash of nudity from Pearl Harbor babe James King, Slackers sucks. There’s simply no one to like: Schwartzman’s lovesick nerd Ethan is revealed to be an obsessive psychopath, while the cool guys he must compete with for the love of…
In May 1997, conductor Zubin Mehta recruited Zhang Yimou (Raise the Red Lantern) to mount a stage presentation of Puccini’s final opera, Turandot, which was based on an old Chinese story. “Usually,” Mehta says, “Turandot is full of Chinese clichés…it looks like a big Chinese restaurant.” So it seemed like…
Sometimes the cinema is just heavenly, and this is one of those times. Returning in a beautifully restored print, with new subtitles, is Federico Fellini’s first color masterpiece (from 1965), bursting with unruly insights on ardor and release. The director’s stout and gleaming wife, Giulietta Masina, plays the leading lady…
Originally made for Polish TV in 1987, and seen only sporadically at special festival and museum showings, Kieslowski’s epic series of 10 hour-long films, each based on one of the Ten Commandments, continues with two episodes. Episode VII, “Thou Shalt Not Steal,” raises the question of whether or not it’s…
Plays about the nobility of disease inevitably bathe the afflicted characters in halos as the most normal, well-adjusted, right-thinking people onstage. It’s everyone else around them who has the problems, imply the playwrights in such dramas. In their canon, a handicap clarifies values, gives the bearer a right to inflict…
In the 174 years since Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes died, he has been celebrated, explicated, copied, collected and feared by everyone who matters. Painters from Delacroix to the YBAs (Young British Artists) have looked to him for inspiration. Writers from Baudelaire to Robert Hughes have sung his praises…
I have two indelible childhood memories of other people’s weddings. There’s the one where a distant relative, built like a knackwurst and thoroughly schnockered, fell backward off her barstool, hitting the floor with a huge smack and sending her fake pearls and fruity cocktail skittering and splattering across the tiles…
When the SamulNori comes, it brings rain, lightning, clouds and wind. But it’s not a weather condition. It’s a Korean percussion ensemble whose name means “to play four parts” or “mastery of four things,” which is exactly what these four guys do. One each covers the four traditional instruments: a…
To call a movie the most accessible Dogme 95 film ever made is not merely damning with faint praise. It also threatens to alienate the two segments of the population that might consider going to see such a film in the first place: fans of the back-to-basics, no-frills-of-any-kind Danish filmmaking…
All those war epics the big movie studios are rushing into release are certainly meant to reflect the present national mood, and if We Were Soldiers or Behind Enemy Lines or Black Hawk Down also happens to strike it rich, that will be fine with the box-office bean-counters. It was…
Sean Penn began 2001 by directing one of the year’s most deeply felt films, The Pledge, in which a frazzled, disconnected Jack Nicholson played a retired cop obsessed with solving the rape and murder of a young girl. He ended it by acting in one of the year’s most woefully…
