Year: 2002

Originally got out in 1995 and now re-released, The Thrill of It All box set hits all the high points of the Roxy canon. Early records had a more jagged sound thanks to Brian Eno’s synth experiments, but when he split to pursue tape-loop electronica, singer Bryan Ferry was left at the helm. His interests…

There are many ways to recognize a music snob, but probably the easiest is his insidious way of insisting that a band’s best work is invariably its earliest, least accessible stuff. In the case of New Order, of course, that early ouvre was Joy Division, the maudlin proto-gothic outfit from Manchester, England. We loved that…

Jennifer Aniston gets some kind of prize, perhaps a case of Turtle Wax, for being the first cast member of Friends to successfully anchor a drama on the big screen. Maybe it helps that Good Girl seems like a mild comedy on the surface. But there’s a shark under the waters. Director Miguel Arteta and…

Jean Luc-Godard’s biggest popular success has been praised in some quarters as the greatest European artwork of the 20th century. We wish we liked it that much. To us, the film’s narrative weaknesses overpower its good points, and what others call iconoclastic genius, we call stubborn mulishness. Still, warts and all, Godard changed the direction…

Roman Polanski’s best movies—Rosemary’s Baby, Repulsion, Chinatown—are all about dread and mistrust. But up until now he’s never made a film about the part of his personal history that very likely caused that rare affinity with dark material, namely his childhood in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Second World War. He’s wanted to film it…

In 1952, nobody expected any staying power out of Singin’ in the Rain. In fact, it was thrown together hastily out of old songs to cash in on Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen’s previous An American in Paris. That’s why the movie is set in the early days of Hollywood—to go along with music that…