Paul Rudd wears a constant look of glazed-eye amusement; everything seems to tickle him, even that which annoys or frustrates or disappoints him. He’s frat-boy handsome and therefore almost anonymous when he stands in a movie-star lineup; in Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things (2003), Rudd received a supposedly extreme…
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…
The protag of Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky is a modestly gaudy people’s heroine industriously repairing the social world, one frayed interaction at a time. After extended cameos in two previous Leigh films (as a resourceful pop tart in All or Nothing and the date-raped rich girl in Vera Drake), fine-boned Sally…
Ostensibly, Zack and Miri Make a Porno should be money-shot Kevin Smith: Pals make a porn to pay the bills and, in the process of gettin’ it on for the video cam, cum to realize that their years-in-the-making friendship is really a love affair. Awwwww, how sweet. In other words,…
On a double bill with L.A. Confidential, Chinatown or just about any film made after 1970 about institutional corruption in Los Angeles, Clint Eastwood’s Changeling, a period drama based on a 1928 Los Angeles missing-child case, would come off as faintly geezerish noir lite. As LAPD scandals go, the case…
The immense popularity of villain Freddy Krueger and the flood of ever-sillier sequels have obscured the fact that the original Nightmare on Elm Street is one of the scariest and best horror movies ever made. Besides its status as one of the most successful and iconic horror films of the…
Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The fall opener at the Center for Visual Art is a conscientious survey of the careers of Christo and Jeanne-Claude as seen through their personal print collection documenting their pioneering conceptual work that began in the 1960s. The exhibit, which includes more than a hundred works of…
Filmmaker Les Blank might be best known for his documentary portraits of American musicians, but many critics believe his masterpiece is Burden of Dreams, which catalogued the filming of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. The fact remains that Blank is one of the most creative and insightful documentary filmmakers working today, which…
Pride and Glory doesn’t make any effort to disguise precisely what it is: a barely-held-together string of vignettes lifted from every cop movie ever made, save perhaps Turner & Hooch. It serves up cliches bound together by a flimsy, bored-out-of-its-own-skull story about bad cops, black sheep, good sons and a…
Anne Hathaway makes a compelling bad girl in Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married. Those who believe that Jonathan Demme went all soft with Philadelphia and never recovered may not be reassured by his latest movie, an ensemble tale of family pathology gussied up with verité camera work, world music and…
Before the impressive Lord of the Rings trilogy (and the slew of Oscars he received) made Peter Jackson a household name, he was already a revered icon among horror fans for the brilliant, insane zombie opus Dead Alive (aka Braindead). The movie is probably the finest example ever of the…
W. may be less frenzied than the usual Oliver Stone sensory bombardment, but in revisiting the early ’00s by way of the late ’60s, this psycho-historical portrait of George W. Bush has all the queasy appeal of a strychnine-laced acid flashback. Hideous re-creations of the shock-and-awful recent past merge with…
Hurricane Katrina may have driven off a large segment of New Orleans’s African-American population, the providers of much of the city’s character. But in one sense the deadly storm was a uniter, not a divider: Only three years ago, the devil wind brought together much of the country in contempt…
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…
Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The fall opener at the Center for Visual Art is a conscientious survey of the careers of Christo and Jeanne-Claude as seen through their personal print collection documenting their pioneering conceptual work that began in the 1960s. The exhibit, which includes more than a hundred works of…
Thankfully for the United States of America, slavery is one aspect of our past that we have struggled with and overcome. Or so most of us think. The fact of the matter is, there are more slaves on the planet today than were taken from Africa in more than 400…
A new kind of war movie for a new kind of war, Body of Lies is about the War on Terror as it is being waged on the ground, in the air, but most of all in cyberspace. Directed with terrific verve by Ridley Scott (coming after the listless American…
The old people remember the past,” a narrator says early in The Exiles over a prologue of Edward S. Curtis photographs — faces of aged Native Americans who may have had their lands taken away, but not their history or memories. For the length of Kent MacKenzie’s 1961 feature, the…
There are copious ways to link How to Lose Friends & Alienate People and Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. Both are based on feather-light books that take a good hour to read for those who scan slowly; both feature actors on the cult side of stardom who do far better…
Redolent of Roman decadence and authority gone mad, the title Religulous rolls pleasingly off the tongue. But Bill Maher’s one-man standup attack on religious fundamentalism is a dog that has more bark than bite — a skeptical, secular-humanist hounding of the hypocrites, amusingly annotated with sarcastic subtitles and clips from…
Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The fall opener at the Center for Visual Art is a conscientious survey of the careers of Christo and Jeanne-Claude as seen through their personal print collection documenting their pioneering conceptual work that began in the 1960s. The exhibit, which includes more than a hundred works of…
There’s a whole lotta fucking going on in Choke, Clark Gregg’s adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s first-person novel about a sex addict named Victor Mancini with severe Mommy issues. There are sweaty flashbacks and splayed-out flash-forwards, too. The only time someone’s getting laid in a bedroom, it’s during a staged rape…
