Film
Julien Temple's Pandaemonium opens portentously, with a closeup of opium dripping into a glass, each drop falling with a booming thud. In a film that imagines the friendship of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth as a series of ...
Film
Songcatcher has a wonderful premise: near the turn of the century, an ethnomusicologist visits her sister, a teacher running a school in rural Appalachia. A specialist in the folk balladry of England, she's shocked to hear these mountain people ...
Television
A ski lodge, 1965. Well-scrubbed teenagers lounge around the fireplace, lazily sipping hot chocolate. In walk four black men, nattily dressed in identical hooded floor-length dusters with enormous white lapels. One of them sports a mountainous, perfectly coifed pompadour. ...
Film
The Imaginary Portraits of George Condo George Condo: Paintings and Drawings George Condo is a man possessed by visions. A successful Soho artist, he paints what he sees: the "antipodal beings" that ...
Books & CDs
In their five brief years, The Clash left behind a peerless body of work. Sweeping, ambitious and constantly evolving, their music encapsulated a short history of rock and roll. At first, they were a crude and caterwauling garage band, ...
Books & CDs
Let's say you're 15 years old and you want to annoy your parents. But how? Dad used to stagedive at Black Flag shows and Mom embarrasses you by wearing her old Dead Kennedys T-shirt to the grocery store. ...
Film
Frederic Fonteyne's An Affair of Love opens beautifully, with a shot of a crowded Paris street so out of focus that the image is pure abstraction. Pedestrians begin as enormous blobs of light that only begin to take shape ...
Film
Andre Techine's Alice and Martin is Greek tragedy in modern dress. Rather than restage Sophocles as turgid, angst-ridden melodrama (as in Volker Schlondorff's Voyager) or insert a masked chorus into standard issue romantic comedy (like Woody Allen's Mighty Aphrodite), ...
Film
Rembrandt Dazzling White Tooth Bleaching Value Kit There is nothing like an Almodovar film. Triumphs of excess, they are nothing if not too much: too much color (reds so vibrant ...
Film
The critic William Pechter once wrote this about Sam Peckinpah's Junior Bonner: Nothing much happens, except that some people, the place they inhabit, and the quality of their lives are brought vividly before us. Which is to say ...