Month: February 2003

Wolfgang Petersen’s early 80s submarine actioner was a surprising hit in America, netting six Oscar nods and much bigger audiences than would normally have turned out for a brooding German drama with an unhappy ending. While sub thrillers had been around long enough for cliches to stick like unwanted barnacles, Petersen found something fresh by…

Krzysztof Kieslowski’s marvelous trilogy provided a worthy capstone to his three-decade career as a leader in European cinema. He retired after finishing Red, and died two years later. Similar to his Decalogue series reinterpreting the Ten Commandments, Three Colors is nominally a loose exploration of the Revolutionary slogan of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Kieslowski himself…

David Cronenberg is infamous for his unique style of horror filmmaking. His films—among them The Fly, Naked Lunch, and Dead Ringers—gaze with icy formalism on worlds where biology has gone mad. They’re a catalogue of physical breakdowns, sexual dysfunctions, florid mutations and hallucinations. His latest, Spider, based on Patrick McGrath’s novel, stars Ralph Fiennes as…

Terry Gilliam’s work had always had anarchy deep in its heart, and more than once anarchy has overwhelmed the project entirely. Certainly, our favorite hometown Python can say with some justification that his failures are more interesting than a lot of director’s successes. There is, in fact, a whole cottage industry devoted to chronicling his…

He was the Hendrix of jazz, was Charlie Parker. The living genius who flamed out young, so consumed by his music that he could practice 15 hours a day if he wasn’t strung out on junk. He helped forge a new form of jazz—bebop, in this case—and improvised riffs on his saxophone that fellow musicians…

This is the Bristol duo that almost singlehandedly invented the late-90s genre du jour, “trip-hop”—meaning atmospheric, heavily remixed club music that brought together elements of electronica, turntablism, rock ’n’ roll, film soundtrack, and torch song. You probably remember Geoff Barrow and Beth Gibbons best for “Sour Times,” a wonderful, sepia-toned single that hit the airwaves…