Month: May 2004

A delightful throwback to the great TV detective shows of the 1970s like Columbo, Monk has inspired a great deal of affection in our mystery-loving Rakish hearts. Quite simply, a very clever show, in terms of both the creatively offbeat, yet solvable crimes (like the skydiver who somehow drowns in midair), and the quirky nature…

When it comes to sketch comedy on the tube, Saturday Night Live has long hogged the limelight (Mad TV is actually edgier and funnier these days), while no one would argue the canonical importance of the Pythons (they’d dissolved before the current cast of SNL was even born). But of the three greatest sketch comedy…

If you think Godzilla movies are mostly silly and puerile, well, you’re probably right. But the 1954 original is a very different monster—instead of cheeseball pro-wrestling with rubber-suited sci-fi beasts, it offered a dark meditation on the awe-inspiring power of the atomic bomb. It’s still a monster movie, to be sure, just one that actually…

Lately Quentin Tarantino’s been agitating to be named the director of the next James Bond movie, which strikes us as a not-half-bad idea. As Tarantino doubtless knows, the Japanese already pulled off their version of such a feat with this movie, in which super-stylish director Takeshi Kitano revisits and updates the beloved 1960s action series…

Argentinian writer/director Alejandro Agresti mined his own childhood for this sure-fire arthouse hit, a lovable cross between My Life As a Dog, The Station Agent, and Amelie. The movie’s heart is Rodrigo Noya as Valentin, a sweet-natured, old-souled little boy who comes to terms with the world, and his deep-set family problems, by resolving issues…

If you’re lacking a song in your heart or a spring in your step, this series of twenty-one musicals in twenty-one days ought to give you plenty of both. This all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza includes longtime favorites like West Side Story, Singin’ in the Rain, and the classic Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers vehicles Top Hat…