Peter Schilling Director Aaron Katz’s Quiet City is part of the ever-growing “mumblecore” movement in indie film, a genre that favors disaffected youth who struggle to pay the bills. These films defy summary and star nonprofessional actors who improvise most of their dialogue, or, well, mumbles. In Quiet City, a girl gets lost in Brooklyn and meets … Read more
Cate Blanchett reprises her role as Elizabeth I, virginal queen of England. As usual there’s all sorts of innuendo about her hunger to get shagged by this or that prince or pirate. This time, England is under threat of Spanish invasion, and who should come to the queen’s aid but Clive Owen’s lusty Sir Walter … Read more
Before Stanley Kubrick dedicated himself to creating “serious” films that viewed humanity with a cold, clinical eye, he made The Killing (1956), a tense little noir about a racetrack heist. Sterling Hayden stars as the mastermind who sets the pot to boiling, and leads a cast of some of the best character actors ever to … Read more
Hollywood is freaking out. Supposedly, the Writers Guild, Directors Guild, and Screen Actors Guild are all planning to go on strike next year (over royalties from the sale of films through other media), so the studios are rushing projects through the mill as fast as they can. Here’s a list of coming attractions, which includes … Read more
The Independent’s Robert Fisk writes that the wanton destruction of archeological sites in Iraq is nothing less than “the death of history”.
3:10 to Yuma. Now playing in theaters around town. The original (1957) is also showing for one week only at
From The Guardian Unlimited (London), an observation that GWB’s new “Freedom Institute” bears a remarkable resemblance to the Derek Zoolander Center For Kids Who Can’t Read Good and Wanna Learn to Do Other Stuff Good Too.
Michael Jackson, the world’s foremost beer critic, has died at age 65. Jackson wrote some of the best guides on the subject. Read his books and you’ll be off to
Over at the website The Movie Box they have the R-rated “Red Band” trailer of the Coen Brothers new film, No Country For Old Men. Country has already garnered raves at Cannes, and this trailer is both a thriller, and a chiller… not to mention in good condition (as opposed to those gauzy YouTube trailers).
Over at Britain’s crack newspaper The Independent, I log on to read the great Middle East journalist Robert Fisk, nearly every day (though he only posts three to four times a week, if that). For insightful and often brave coverage of that quagmire, Fisk is the nonpareil. Here he writes of the Armenian Genocide, the … Read more