During the early portion of his career, the late Syd Barrett, who named and led Pink Floyd, generally maintained his equilibrium while treading the fine line between genius and madness — but he couldn’t keep up this balancing act indefinitely. His slow-motion tumble into mental illness, and the strange, beautiful…
To some, the story of Christopher Johnson McCandless, the 24-year-old Emory University graduate who starved to death in the Alaskan wilderness in the spring of 1992, will never be anything more than a case of a spoiled bourgeois brat with half-cocked survivalist fantasies (and possible suicidal tendencies) who ran away…
After Hair, Hairspray, and the mass marketing of tie-dye, can the ’60s be shrunk to fit any further? Yes, indeed, here comes Julie Taymor to run the revolutions of sex, class and race through the PG-13 sieve. Not that one turns to musicals for deep thought, but John Waters at…
Had Israeli director Eytan Fox’s new film, about a passionate affair between two men on opposite sides of the Israeli-Arab conflict, been released in the early 1970s (when I was the same age as its twenty-something hipsters and living in Tel Aviv), the movie would have attracted a smattering of…
Caligula: Imperial Edition(Penthouse) (Spoiler alert: Fisting!) One day back in the swingin’ ’70s, somebody mentioned how “absolute power corrupts absolutely,” and then Bob Guccione, Gore Vidal, Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren and Peter O’Toole said, “Let’s make a big-budget movie about that, with come shots.” And Caligula was born. Actually, Penthouse…
Clyfford Still Unveiled. A master and pioneer of mid-twentieth-century abstract expressionism, painter Clyfford Still was something of an eccentric in the artist-as-egomaniac stripe. His anti-social behavior led to a situation where 94 percent of his artworks remained together after he died — a staggeringly complete chronicle of his oeuvre that…
Clyfford Still Unveiled. A master and pioneer of mid-twentieth-century abstract expressionism, painter Clyfford Still was something of an eccentric in the artist-as-egomaniac stripe. His antisocial behavior led to a situation where 94 percent of his artworks remained together after he died — a staggeringly complete chronicle of his oeuvre that…
Departure delays got you down? Escape the hustle and bustle of airport woes and discover a whole new terrain at the movie-enhanced art mezzanine of Concourse A at Denver International Airport. In between Hudson News and the Cowboy Bar, the savvy searcher will find an escalator to a secret serenity…
Director Robert Benton, best known for his zeitgeist-y divorce drama Kramer vs. Kramer, has tapped into more than a few current trends in Feast of Love. There are the interlocking mini-stories, à la Crash; the different color filters for different scenes (happy moments in yellow, sad ones in blue), à…
The Kingdom is the first film from Peter Berg since the actor-turned-director’s Friday Night Lights, which spawned an acclaimed, if struggling, franchise for NBC. There will be no small-screen spin-off of The Kingdom — there are too many corpses lying around to populate a sequel, much less a series. Besides,…
So here’s this Arab actor talking to me in Hebrew about his role as a Saudi soldier in Peter Bergs The Kingdom which ought to be enough cultural confusion to throw anyone, let alone someone just cruising onto the radar of an industry not known for casting Middle Eastern actors…
Clyfford Still Unveiled. A master and pioneer of mid-twentieth-century abstract expressionism, painter Clyfford Still was something of an eccentric in the artist-as-egomaniac stripe. His antisocial behavior led to a situation where 94 percent of his artworks remained together after he died — a staggeringly complete chronicle of his oeuvre that…
Saturday Night Fever: 30th Anniversary Special Collectors Edition (Paramount) For all its camp-classic status as the ultimate disco-fever dream, John Badhams movie truly is remarkable — a foul-mouthed, mean-streets masterpiece that just happens to feature a Bee Gees score that spreads like melted cheese thirty years later. And, of course,…
I’ve said it before and hope to again: David Cronenberg is the most provocative, original and consistently excellent North American director of his generation. From Videodrome (1983) through A History of Violence (2005), neither Scorsese nor Spielberg nor even David Lynch has enjoyed a comparable run. A rhapsodic movie directed…
Until 2005, Richard Shepard’s was a lamentable direct-to-prop-plane filmography populated with such forgettable titles as Cool Blue, Oxygen, Mexico City and The Linguini Incident, the latter of which was a heist film most notable for pairing David Bowie and Buck Henry — and that’s not even a punchline. For a…
Just a guess here, but the majority of Amanda Bynes fans probably didn’t get most of the Shakespeare references in her As You Like It-inspired She’s the Man, so behold: This time she’s gone for something a bit more familiar with Sydney White. Originally titled Sydney White and the Seven…
In the first few minutes of Eastern Promises, the striking new thriller from David Cronenberg, a throat is sliced, a uterus hemorrhages, and a newborn baby, slimy and palpitating, emerges from the womb of its dead mother. None of which comes as much of a surprise from the maker of…
In the new Neil Jordan movie, Jodie Foster plays New York talk radio DJ Erica Bain, who survives a vicious Central Park mugging and becomes an urban crusader devoted to cleaning up the city — with a Glock instead of a broom. Yes, The Brave One is that movie: the…
This is a mockumentary, right?” I’ve been asked that question at least a dozen times since The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters made its bow at the Slamdance Film Festival in January. Quite simply, some folks just don’t believe that Seth Gordon’s film about two men vying for…
The Salton Sea is an ecological disaster, a man-made mistake that was supposed to become a resort to rival Palm Springs. Instead the sea has turned into a replacement wetlands refuge for sea birds whose habitats were consumed by such densely populated Southern California cities as San Diego and Los…
It’s pretty much a toss-up which I love more: gorging on cinema or getting up at noon. And so, on the first day of the Toronto International Film Festival, in lieu of contemplating Bela Tarr’s The Man From London, I lingered in my pajamas anticipating The Breakfast From Room Service…
Clyfford Still Unveiled. A master and pioneer of mid-twentieth-century abstract expressionism, painter Clyfford Still was something of an eccentric in the artist-as-egomaniac stripe. His antisocial behavior led to a situation where 94 percent of his artworks remained together after he died — a staggeringly complete chronicle of his oeuvre that…
