Month: May 2003

These things become familiar, of course, but how shocking a really moral film like this was, in 1985. Stephen Frears’ snapshot of the 80s was out of tune with its time, but slowly built as an art-house video cult in the 90s. Which is to say, by the time conversations about “identity politics” and “victim…

Sergio Leone, who reinvented the gunslinger genre in spaghetti westerns like The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, only directed one film in the fifteen years before his death. That would be this Prohibition-era drama, but in many ways the perfect capstone to his career, blending the spirits of Goodfellas and Great Expectations with one…

Are there three sweeter words than “Peter Sellers retrospective”? Hmmm… “you’ve got mail”—no. “Here’s fifty bucks”—well, maybe. We haven’t seen about half the titles here (yet), but we can tell you with absolutely authority that there are four can’t-lose offerings from the mid-century’s great comedic chameleon: his two Stanley Kubrick collaborations, Dr. Strangelove and Lolita;…

Who wouldn’t want to soar through the air on the wings of a bird? Well, not us, because heights scare the living bejeezus out of us. But otherwise, sure, everybody would. And barring a medically iffy, possibly uninsurable operation to transplant your brain into a duck, Winged Migration is your best option. The product of…

If you combined the directorial styles of Quentin Tarantino, John Waters, and the bloody Grand Guignol of early Peter Jackson in one guy, you might have something like Japan’s Takashi Miike. Except maybe that he makes more films than they do—an astonishing four dozen in the last decade, usually horror and yakuza gangster movies. But…

Even in the age of Xbox, kids of a certain age can still be utterly transfixed by a good old-fashioned circus. Maybe the older and more jaded can be brought back into the tent with this supercool exhibit about the science behind acrobatics, high-wire walking, the trapeze, and all manner of circus daredevilry. The attraction…