Screen
Reasonably entertaining diversion
Oh my God, they’ve shot Dame Helen Mirren! Realizing the Oscar-winning actress is playing a part, and not herself, the thought nonetheless is inescapable when Mirren’s ex-CIA agent takes a bullet in RED. I mean: How dare they...
All work and no play…
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference. —Robert Frost
Buster (Rami...
You don’t want to ‘Hear About the Morgans’
Pure, communal silence can be a wonderful thing, and if you haven’t experienced any lately, I recommend you see the first available screening of the new romantic comedy Did You Hear About the Morgans? Each of its theoretical punch lines is preceded by an eerie second...
Mary, Mary, what you going to name that pretty little baby?
The infamous Beale Street belongs to the city of Memphis, Tennessee, but every city has a Beale Street. So claimed writer James Baldwin, born...
More suspense from ‘Whiteout,’ please
Here's a really cool idea for a film: you're a U.S. Marshal working at a United States research facility in Antarctica, helping keep the peace. Like a campus cop, your primary job is dealing with drunks and minor thefts, but you're hoping that a major crime will ...
Savage deception, revealed
Amir Bar- Lev’s previous documentary, My Kid Could Paint That, questioned the authorship of a little girl’s unusually sophisticated and lucrative canvases, and the role her father may have played in their creation. It was a detective story as well as a highly ...
Still crazy after all these years
If 40 years of Saturday Night Live has taught us anything it is this: comedy is the sharpest form of criticism. Biting wit levied by the absurd becomes the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down, and SNL has been spoon feeding America since 1975...
The Medicine
The sages call it by many names: yagé, ambiwaska, aioasca, but most know it as ayahuasca: a hallucinogenic brew drunk during a spiritual ceremony....
Delightful con artists
Sean-Pierre Jeunet hasn’t directed many films, but they’ve all been terrific, distinctive and stylish. Two you’ll hopefully have enjoyed already are The City of Lost Children and the weird Amélie. With Micmacs (original title Micmacs à tire-larigot) Jeunet moves ...
