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Straight talkVINCENT GALLO Since its infamous debut at the last Cannes Film Festival, director and actor Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny has become the year’s most controversial movie, as much for its deliberately slow pacing as for the final scene, in which Gallo and Chloë Sevigny engage in an explicit, unsimulated sex act. Gallo chatted … Read more

A friend recently pointed out the hypocrisy in how I love bloody, mobbed-out films where people get whacked with a ball point pen in the jugular—and yet nearly have a nervous breakdown when I see a squirrel smashed in the street.I don’t know if this requires serious examination on my part but it is true. … Read more

Fear is Elias Merhige’s business, as you’ll know from his earlier films like the avant-garde creeper Begotten and the 2000 arthouse hit Shadow of the Vampire, with its witty premise that the villain in the great 1922 silent film Nosferatu had been played by a real vampire. His new film Suspect Zero stars Aaron Eckhart … Read more

“Zookeeper” is surely one of the top twenty coolest jobs in the world, and for Ross Taylor, a South Minneapolis native and University of Minnesota graduate, the path to this career started, oddly enough, in clown college. Studying to be a circus clown led to a job as big-top animal caretaker and then, for the … Read more

Mary’s watching: “Live Forever: The Rise And Fall Of British Pop” I settled into my comfy chair and with every good bed-wetting liberal intention tried to watch the Democratic National Convention on TV. I felt like a big dumb demographic cliché. With one eye on John Edwards’ shiny hopeful face, my hopelessly Gen-X other eye … Read more

In film after film, John Sayles is one of the only directors out there unafraid to take a hard look at the negative influence of money and power on American society. At times that leads to heavy-handed didacticism, as with the disappointing Sunshine State, but we’ve got a good feeling about Silver City, which reunites … Read more

If moviespeak shorthand abbreviates “romantic comedy” as “romcom,” then this is a “romzom”—a romantic comedy set amid the zombie plague of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. Director Edgar Wright and star Simon Pegg, who also wrote the movie, first worked together on a British sitcom called Spaced, and it’s obvious they have great creative … Read more

Director Takashi Miike’s reputation rests on his bizarre visual imagery and his mindbogglingly prolific career—though Gozu only came out in Japan last year, the Japanese gonzo has already finished seven other films. So it might be too much to ask that everything that happens in this movie makes logical sense. Nominally a cross between an … Read more