Marie Antoinette (Sony) Sofia Coppola’s third feature grabs you by your frilly lapels from the jump, with Gang of Four’s “Natural’s Not in It” showering guitar chords all over the credits as Kirsten Dunst nods to the audience, as if to say, Hang tight — this thing’s gonna be a…
Munched: This workshop reading of local actor/author Kim Porter’s new play features Ken Love in a story about Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, a psychiatric disorder in which mothers poison their kids in order to get attention for themselves. Here, we meet Marybeth, who’s spent 25 years in prison after killing…
Bicycle Thieves: The Criterion Collection (Criterion) The Boy From Lebanon (Picture This) The Butcher Boy (Warner Bros.) The Cave of the Yellow Dog (Tartan) The Departed (Warner Bros.) Devil’s Den (Starz) F**K (ThinkFilm) Green for Danger: The Criterion Collection (Criterion) The Hills: The Complete First Season (Paramount) Hustle: Complete Season…
Lately, the Nintendo DS has become a virtual Monster.com. You can play a defense attorney (Phoenix Wright), surgeon (Trauma Center), and even a cook (Cooking Mama). Now, thanks to Hotel Dusk: Room 215, you can add private eye to that list. But don’t expect the sexy detective work of Chinatown…
Make a Saturday morning stop at the neighborhood garage sale, and you might find a stack of watercolors depicting flowers, butterflies and landscapes, at 25 cents apiece. They look like public-access how-to works, and they really aren’t that great. Mom painted these back in the ’80s when she needed an…
Midway through last April’s press screening of Paul Greengrass’ United 93, I made a mental note to watch the end credits for the name of the actor playing the role of Ben Sliney, the National Operations Manager of the Federal Aviation Administration’s command center in Herndon, Virginia. On September 11,…
As we’ve seen from British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s guerrilla-style comedy hit Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, one actor’s deadpan dedication to heavily accented cultural naiveté in the face of unsuspecting victims can do wonders. Actor Ken Davitian, who played Borat’s bearded and…
What could be scarier than yet another PG-13 creepfest serving up pasty, staggering ghouls with stringy hair? Why, the same PG-13 creepfest set against the high-tension backdrop of . . . sunflower farming! Sorry, fear fans, if you were expecting a Ferry-Morse catalog of floral fright from The Messengers, the…
Explaining the appeal of the WarioWare series is like trying to describe a fever dream: It doesn’t make sense unless experienced. Nevertheless, here goes: Mario’s Bizarro-universe twin, the greedy Wario, has invented more than 200 absurd microgames in a scheme to get rich and corner the videogame market. Quantity is…
The Science of Sleep (Warner Bros.) Feature films are to video directors what sitcoms are to stand-up comedians, and for every David Fincher and Seinfeld, there are dozens of artists who should have stayed in the field they know best. Michel Gondry, who made his name directing fantastic videos for…
“Armor de Amor — Agave Art for the 21st Century” at five15 Gallery: Artist Carrie May Kreyche pairs natural objects with manmade materials to make humorous, yet profound, observations about the world around us. In her Suckulent series, a baby-bottle nipple is surrounded by rings of dried cactus leaves. They…
Alfred Hitchcock: The Early Years of the Master of Suspense (Lions Gate) All Quiet on the Western Front (Universal) Anything but Love: Volume One (Fox) Arabian Nights (Universal) Best Picture: Academy Award Winners Collection (Paramount) Boynton Beach Club (Sony) Charmed: The Complete Seventh Season (Paramount) Cinderella III: A Twist in…
Though I’m sure it’s purely coincidental, the decision to release the Diane Keaton-Mandy Moore rom-com Because I Said So with the scent of this year’s Sundance Film Festival still fresh in the air provides us with an excellent opportunity to review the wayward career of the movie’s director, Michael Lehmann…
The Good German, directed by Steven Soderbergh from Joseph Kanon’s best seller, is as much simulation as movie. Specifically, it’s the simulation of a 1940s private eye flick. It’s not just a period film, but one that feigns being shot as it would have been in that period. Filmed for…
Park City, Utah — Even by the lacerating standards of recent Sundance docs Why We Fight and Iraq in Fragments, the nonfiction at this year’s fest felt, well, real — alarmingly so. Indeed, after doing battle with films about U.S. policies on Iraq, Darfur, and global warming, this critic was…
Park City, Utah — We all know about the cathartic power of blues music, but until the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, who knew that it could serve as a cure-all for everything from nymphomania to childhood sexual abuse? In Hustle & Flow director Craig Brewer’s Black Snake Moan, whose out-of-competition…
One morning, Gary Walkow was suddenly transformed into a successful Hollywood filmmaker. Gone were the hat-in-hand searches for financing, the deferred salaries, the long shooting days with undermanned crews, and the months upon years spent touring the festival circuit while seeking a distribution deal. For a moment, he was taking…
It isn’t difficult to believe that Tina Fabrique is the real Ella Fitzgerald while watching her perform in Ella, the musical biography of Fitzgerald that Arizona Theater Company has just remounted at Mesa Arts Center. I didn’t need to squint or try to forget what Ella should sound like; Fabrique…
The Death Bite: Hal Corley’s unfortunately named drama is not about vampirism, but rather about 18 hours in the life of Robyn Fair, an oddball who longs to launch her life from the New Jersey suburb where she lives. First, she has to untangle herself from her deceitful foster daughter,…
Catch a Fire (Focus) In his commentary for the underrated, undervalued Catch a Fire, director Phillip Noyce discusses the inspiration: witnessing the terror attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. He wanted to comprehend “the terrorist’s mind,” so he found a story that accomplishes such a difficult thing: the…
Anyone who played games back in the olden days (i.e., the late ’80s) knows that they used to be a lot tougher. Cartridges back then subscribed to the “Oh, you want some of this?” school of game design. They made you gnash your teeth, throw your controller, and bellow four-letter…
1934 In her first stage performance, Ella Fitzgerald wins an Amateur Night competition at the Apollo Theater. 1936 Ella’s first recording, “Love and Kisses,” is released on Decca Records. 1938 Ella’s first Number One single is “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” a novelty number recorded for an Abbott and Costello movie in which…
