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This saucy thriller has abundant pleasures, including an intelligent script that never once falters, a cast of strong supporting actors that includes Bill Nighy, and two of today’s best actresses unleashed in fury. Judi Dench, shedding her crown for a change, plays a British schoolmarm bent by her loneliness and a desire for younger women. … Read more

Nothing much happens in Old Joy, yet it has all the depths of a lonely walk in an unpeopled forest. Simply put, a young man on the verge of fatherhood takes a trip with a college friend who cannot find his place in the world. But with her camera low to the ground, director Kelly … Read more

Peter O’Toole’s swan song. A pair of nearly forgotten, aging actors have shared their daily lives over pints and tea for decades, and find themselves intruded on by a teenage girl who arrives in town to look after her uncle. When she falls in with O’Toole, the spirits of both are boosted. In America, treatises … Read more

Already lauded with two best-picture awards, this second Iwo Jima picture from Clint Eastwood looks even more promising than the first (Flags of Our Fathers), which was no slouch. Looking much more brutal and unforgiving than Flags, not to mention creating a very forgiving portrait of a former enemy, Letters is certain to arouse controversy … Read more

This story of Ofelia, a young girl trying to get by in post-World War II Spain, is billed as an adult fable. When her widowed mother marries and becomes impregnated by one of Franco’s most brutal captains, they are sent to a remote military academy under his tutelage. There, the girl retreats from the cruelty … Read more

Some kids say that Garden State is the quintessential film for Generation Y. You’d think they could do better. But its marvelous soundtrack spirals around a couple of perfect songs by the Shins, a band that gives us abundant hope for the future of pop music. Their new album is the kind that reveals nuance … Read more

Cold winters in dark places have always inspired a rich interior life, and in Scandinavia, life indoors was traditionally warmed by music both hot and filled with light. Finland’s Varttina, a ten-piece outfit fronted by three stormy blondes, preserved some of its nation’s loveliest (and naughtiest) ancient folk songs early in its career. These days, … Read more

When someone was heard singing “Over the Rainbow” in a locker room recently, it inspired a roomful of clammy, half-naked people to comment. One rightly called it “a good song for when things aren’t so great”; another mistakenly described it as “a Judy Garland song.” Though Judy made it famous, it’s actually a Harold Arlen … Read more

At forty, Kristin Hersh still sounds like the tormented teenager who founded Throwing Muses. These days, though, her rage has been tempered and sweetened by years of travel, parenting, music-making, and management of the bipolar disorder that ravaged her early life (and fueled some of the best punk rock ever committed to guitar by a … Read more

The fact that Sibony’s father was a contractor has a lot to do with this thirty-two-year old New Yorker’s affinity for materials like foam insulation, hollow-core doors, cardboard, and the like. He assembles these humble goods into sculptures and installations that—as at last year’s Whitney Biennial—are curiously arresting if you don’t dismiss them outright as … Read more