Month: April 2004

Our only regret, really, is that it took us so long to finally check out this bustling Vietnamese spot, one of the reasons Nicollet Avenue earned the nickname “Eat Street.” Big portions, tasty dishes (love the chicken with ginger sauce), and nicely affordable: We splurged on one of the most expensive items on the menu—the…

D-Day turns sixty next month, bringing a barrage of notable World War Two movies on the DVD release front. We’re especially fond of this one, a very different proposition from what you’ll usually find in the genre. Directed in 1968 by John Boorman (at his creative peak, after Point Blank and before Deliverance), Hell avoids…

“You’ll feel like you’re in Mexico!” it says on EBM’s website, which may explain why Dick and Lynne Cheney kept their visit short last March. For our part, we always leave with more than we came for. El Burrito’s boggling array of dried peppers, from ancho to pasilla, can lure anyone into the Mercado, and…

Dyed-in-the-wool Marxists will note that this box set collecting seven of Groucho, Harpo, and Chico’s late-period movies is hardly definitive—their most anarchically funny work, Duck Soup and Animal Crackers, is missing. But we do have the two true classics they made with their most simpatico producer, Irving Thalberg, A Night at the Opera and A…

Everybody thinks modern life moves too fast these days, but for the little village of Quiquendone, it’s literally true. At first, the townspeople in Jules Verne’s allegorical short story (getting its first non-operatic dramatic adaptation at the hands of local troupe Hardcover Theater) live peaceably rustic lives at rustic speeds, as if Newtonian physics were…

A new Jim Jarmusch movie is always cause for celebration around here. Sure, he’s open to charges of languid pacing and, especially in earlier films, an indifference to plot. But there’s a beyond-left-field outlook to his best work, like Ghost Dog and Dead Man, that you just can’t find in any other English-language director. (Liking…