Month: July 2006

As teenagers, we used to drive past Bob Dylan’s rural Minnesota country home and marvel at all the security lighting. Why, we wondered, was he so paranoid? Who’d want to bother an old washed-up folksinger? Now, at sixty-five, Dylan is a rock ’n’ roll star reborn, making some of the most vibrant and relevant music…

Celebrating its seventh year of mixing music with film, our little Sound Unseen is all grown up now. This month, it will spare nothing to entertain: Dance-partying, rock ’n’ bowling, and fifteen or so films are all on the docket, with a whole lot more. Among our top picks is My Name is Albert Ayler,…

In the hands of Outkast video director Bryan Barber, this unusual musical boasts gorgeous cinematography, the kind of rich detail that recalls The Sting, and songs that mix hip-hop with the spirit of Cab Calloway. Set in the Prohibition-era South, Outkasters Antwan A. Patton (that’s Big Boi to his fans), and André Benjamin (aka André…

As we draw closer to the five-year mark, filmmakers have grown less shy about portraying the tragedy that, as many people say, felt like a big-budget, special-effects movie in the first place. With World Trade Center, Oliver Stone focuses on two Port Authority officers (played by Nicholas Cage and Michael Peña) who found themselves trapped…

The Quinceañera is the traditional Mexican celebration of a girl’s fifteenth birthday and subsequent graduation into womanhood, but one young lady has beaten the party to the punch. Magdalena gets kicked out of the house when her Catholic parents learn she is pregnant; forced to turn her attentions from party dresses and limousines, she finds…

Faith in Woody Allen was restored for many with last winter’s steamy British thriller Match Point; now the director is reviving his comedic antics with a playful murder mystery. As Allen once again sets his story across the pond, Scarlett Johansson, his muse of the moment, plays an American journalism student in London who telepathically…