No writer ever gazed deeper or more despairingly into the prison of middle-class American conformity than Richard Yates, which may explain why none of his books sold more than 12,000 copies in his lifetime and why it’s taken more than forty years for one of them to reach the big…
Is it a sign of the Apocalypse? Something in the water? Or just the way the wind is blowing? Whatever the case, when our often-contentious quintet of film critics put their heads together about the best movies of 2008, they managed to agree (more or less) on a dozen they…
As far as Jeffrey Katzenberg is concerned, up until now there have been but two “revolutions” in the movie business: the mass introduction of sound, with 1927’s The Jazz Singer (itself a process thirty years in the making), and, a year later, the debut of The Viking, the first feature…
Michael Jacobs, a filmmaker based in San Francisco, is the director of a movie called Audience of One. It’s a documentary about a Pentecostal minister who says he’s gotten the divine green light to make a mega-budget, religious science-fiction epic. If you attended one of twenty-odd regional film festivals in…
Adam Helms. This solo in the MCA’s Paper Works Gallery is the New York artist’s first museum show anywhere. In his works on paper and in a monumental sculpture that conjures up a shooting blind, Helms explores political themes, especially armed struggle. He takes images of different radical and extremist…
Adam Helms. This solo in the MCA’s Paper Works Gallery is the New York artist’s first museum show anywhere. In his works on paper and in a monumental sculpture that conjures up a shooting blind, Helms explores political themes, especially armed struggle. He takes images of different radical and extremist…
Walt Kowalski growls a lot — a dyspeptic rumble that wells up from deep inside his belly when he catches sight of his midriff-baring teenage granddaughter text-messaging her way through her grandmother’s funeral, or when his good-for-nothing son and daughter-in-law suggest that he sell his house in a gang-infested corner…
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is certainly curious — a modest F. Scott Fitzgerald story, about a man born in the twilight of life and gradually regressing toward dawn, that has been adapted into a two-ton Oscar-season white elephant. Directed by David Fincher from a screenplay by Eric Roth,…
“You’ve made the first movie of the Obama generation!” exclaimed an audience member as he rushed up to Clint Eastwood after a recent screening of Gran Torino. “Well,” the 78-year-old actor-director replied, without missing a beat, “I was actually born under Hoover.” It was an ironic juxtaposition, given that Eastwood’s…
Like Doubt, Stephen Daldry’s The Reader is low-budget, high-profile and beamed straight at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Category of High Moral Tone. Only in this case, the stakes are way higher and the attitude muted to a fault. Based on a partly autobiographical novel by Bernhard…
Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg — a lot of name for a lot of guy. Born into aristocracy in 1907, he was a soldier by the age of nineteen — and, by most accounts, a warrior with the soul of a poet (he was especially smitten with the…
It’s July 20, 1944, and Adolf Hitler has been assassinated — the victim of a bomb blast organized and executed by a cabal of high-ranking German army officers seeking to wrest control of the country away from the Third Reich and, with luck, bring an end to World War II…
Back in the early 1980s, when I was a graduate student in Boston, a prominent professor I knew was accused of sexually harassing a female colleague. This man was a compulsive flirt who couldn’t get within feet of a woman without coming on to her, so I wasn’t altogether surprised…
Two years ago nearly to the day, Will Smith and Italian director Gabriele Muccino released The Pursuit of Happyness, one of the most underrated of recent Hollywood movies, which starred Smith as a single father navigating a hand-to-mouth existence on the streets of San Francisco. Writing at the time, I…
Adam Helms. This solo in the MCA’s Paper Works Gallery is the New York artist’s first museum show anywhere. In his works on paper and in a monumental sculpture that conjures up a shooting blind, Helms explores political themes, especially armed struggle. He takes images of different radical and extremist…
For so major a movie star — at least, once upon a time — Jim Carrey seems to make a lot of awfully minor films, several of them over and over again. Isn’t Yes Man, in which Carrey’s self-absorbed Debbie Downer greenlights every bad decision in an effort to reinvent…
Flying saucers just aren’t that scary anymore. Especially after Ed Wood and Mars Attacks, it’s hard to take a threat from a giant Frisbee all that seriously. So what’s an update of the iconic 1951 sci-fi flick The Day the Earth Stood Still to do? In an extremely bold move,…
I hear America singing, and I see…Richard Nixon. Not the man, but the muse: Has any president since Lincoln inspired more movies, TV mini-series and operas? As Nixon’s beetle brows, ski nose and mirthless grin were made for caricature, so his rampant pathology was a gift for novelists and psycho-historians…
Adam Helms. This solo in the MCA’s Paper Works Gallery is the New York artist’s first museum show anywhere. In his works on paper and in a monumental sculpture that conjures up a shooting blind, Helms explores political themes, especially armed struggle. He takes images of different radical and extremist…
Adam Helms. This solo in the MCA’s Paper Works Gallery is the New York artist’s first museum show anywhere. In his works on paper and in a monumental sculpture that conjures up a shooting blind, Helms explores political themes, especially armed struggle. He takes images of different radical and extremist…
First, a key spoiler: Cadillac Records is not the story of Chess Records, the blues label started in Chicago in 1950 by brothers Leonard and Phil Chess that featured among its stable of artists Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry and Etta James, plus many others who birthed…
It really shouldn’t have been so hard to make a decent Punisher movie. The Marvel Comics character, who shot to prominence in the late ’80s after Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns proved there was an appetite for psychotic and homicidal superheroes, is basically Death Wish’s Paul Kersey on steroids…
